Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (41 page)

When all eight magazines were topped off, the team could head over to the cafeteria, grab a nap or whatever. A shift usually alternated forty-five minutes on, forty-five minutes off, dependin’ on how high the grinders were turned up. If we let those bastards run empty, though, we’d spend the rest of the night strugglin’ to keep ‘em fed.

Maybe there are people in the world who look forward to goin’ to work because each day is new and interesting, but that wasn’t life on groundwood. Still, it wasn’t a terrible way to earn a living for a man who didn’t mind strenuous, steamy, wet, filthy, deafenin’ work. In a way, we weren’t so different from those mindless creatures. We lurched in, punched the time clock, filled the magazines, punched out, and lurched back home again.

One night management shut down Number Twelve and put up a tarp to keep out pryin’ eyes while they ran tests. A paper mill doesn’t exactly smell like a field of daisies, but the reek that greeted us at the top of the stairs that night ‘bout knocked us off our feet. Reminded me of the time a guy died in the apartment building next to mine and nobody missed him for a while. The day they found him, that stench was everywhere. Once you get a whiff of death, you never forget it. It comes back to you at the strangest times.

About a month later, management called graveyard shift in half an hour early and told us things’d be different for a while. If anyone thought he’d have a problem stickin’ a pick into those creatures, he’d be reassigned, no questions asked. They knew what they was doing. No one was gonna be a wimp in front of everyone else. The mill chews up and spits wimps out just like the grinders turn timber into mulch. Any man who asked out might as well have moved to Timbuktu, wherever the hell that is.

On the way outta the locker room there was two boxes—one with rubber gloves and the other with paper masks to cover our mouths and noses. The foreman stood next to the boxes, so we all took some and stuffed ‘em into our pockets, but it seemed pretty clear to me no one had any intention of using ‘em.

As we climbed the stairs to the lines, the building began to shake and rumble from the grinders startin’ up. I pulled a pair of yellow foam earplugs from my shirt pocket, rolled ‘em up and stuck ‘em in my ears. When I reached the top of stairs, the stench caught me off guard. We only thought it’d been bad before. Remembering the way water from the lagoon splashed in my face during log falls, I pulled the paper mask out of my pocket and put it on. The others around me did the same.

That night, I was paired with Ernie Hamilton. He liked to pee in the magazines instead of going downstairs, and climbed up on the roof to sleep between loads. Lazy as the day is long. One time he didn’t wake up and I had to get the foreman to help me when the grinders started runnin’ empty. Why he didn’t get a free pass to the unemployment office, I don’t know. His wife must have been stepping out with the supervisor or something. Stuff like that happens in a small town.

I clambered over the metal stiles that spanned the conveyers until I got to Number Six, took a deep breath, put the new gloves on under my work gloves and turned toward the lagoon for the first time. Mixed in with the debarked logs were naked, decomposed bodies. They floated in the water and dangled behind the grotto ceiling like there’d been a hurricane or somethin’. They was all torn up, with missin’ chunks of skin. I could see their muscles, bones, and innards. Their eyes gaped in what looked like amazement—those that still had eyes, that is.

Acid churned in my stomach and burned my throat. My flesh ran cold. We’d seen these things on TV, but to be this close was something else. I wanted to take a deep breath to settle my nerves, but the stench made that seem like a bad idea. One of ‘em bobbed to the surface right in front of me. For a minute, I thought it was gonna crawl out of the lagoon and bite me. I took a step back, then I caught myself. I didn’t know who might be watchin’.
They’re just logs
, I told myself.
No different from the millions of others I’ve sent to the grinders over the years
. I swallowed hard, took off my helmet—against company regs, but who cared?—put on a little hat made out of newsprint, and wrenched a picaroon out of the overhead beam.
Just logs.

Ernie was sittin’ on the wooden bench beside the line, lookin’ green around the gills and smokin’ a cigarette—also against regs, but it probably helped mask the stench. When he noticed me starin’ at him, he leapt up, ground his cigarette out under his foot and reached for one of the consoles that hung from the ceiling between each pair of magazines. At the push of a button, the conveyer sprang to life. It was show time.

The first object I struck with my peavey pole was solid. A log. I thanked God and all the saints, and pulled it close enough to get my picaroon into it. Water slopped over the edge of the lagoon and pooled at my feet as I hauled it onto the conveyor beside me.
Only eight more hours,
I told myself.
I can do this.

The next one was a log, too, and I almost had myself convinced this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Then my peavey hit somethin’ that didn’t feel the way any log did. It sank in with a dull thunk. I couldn’t bring myself to look. I just hauled it close, dragged it onto the belt and focused on the logs bobbin’ in the lagoon, tryin’ to figure out how to avoid the nightmares floatin’ among them. The first monster disappeared from my peripheral vision and I chased it with another log the same way I chase scotch with a beer.

“Ah, crap,” I heard Ernie say behind me, loud and clear through his facemask and my earplugs. I tried not to imagine him rollin’ that thing off the line and into the magazine. Then I tried not to picture what the log did when it landed on top of it. Tried, and failed.

The first hour was grim. The creatures didn’t take up as much room as logs did and the wood fallin’ on top of ‘em smashed ‘em up even more, so it took longer to fill the magazines than usual.

When we finished the first load, I got out of there as quick as I could without looking like I was runnin’ away. I ambled down the stairs and headed through the maze of machinery to the cafeteria, walking faster the farther away I got. I left my lunchbox in my locker. Nothing solid was gonna stay in my stomach, so I just had coffee. Gracie, who worked the cash, offered a tired smile. Usually I woulda flirted with her, but I wasn’t in the mood. I didn’t think she was, either. Everyone in the mill knew what we was doin’.

Since it wasn’t break time for anyone else, the cafeteria was deserted. The night watchman saw me and sauntered over from his booth at the main entrance.

I looked up from my cup and nodded. He must have seen somethin’ in my face, ‘cos he didn’t stick around. I glanced at the clock, dreadin’ the moment when I had to go back. It came soon enough, though. I put in my earplugs, strapped on the facemask and slipped on the rubber gloves before I mounted the stairs to groundwood again.

It was Ernie’s turn to haul, so I wore my hardhat, grabbed a picaroon and stationed myself at the front of the line. The first three things that came at me were logs. Then one of them things showed up. It was harder to handle than timber, soft and floppy, with limbs—and other parts that were never meant to dangle—danglin’ all over the place. It almost got past me, and what a monumental disaster that would have been if it had reached the end of the belt and tumbled onto the floor with the oversized pieces someone would trim at the end of shift with a chainsaw.

I wrestled it into the magazine and right away there was another one. And another. It didn’t really matter how they went in. Because they was flexible they couldn’t jam up like logs. Still, old habits die hard. I lined them up like soldiers at attention when I could, and didn’t look down when I dropped logs on top. My earplugs and the steady thrum of the grinders saved me from the sound of them bein’ crushed and mangled by falling timber. Even so, my imagination did a pretty good job. I was just glad I wasn’t downstairs to see what was comin’ out of the grinders.

Men who work in a mill are used to getting used to things. At the end of the first shift, we kidded around a little, though nobody mentioned the gruesome sights we’d seen over the past eight hours. After two weeks, we was telling zombie jokes and playing tricks on each other with decomposed arms and legs. We got through it, because we had no choice. No one had a trade, and there was only so many jobs at Burger King. We all spent a little more time at the bar, and showered and washed our clothes more’n usual, but as long as the paychecks kept comin’ we showed up and did our jobs.

After six weeks, it was all over. The box of masks and gloves disappeared. It still reeked on the lines—the smell had soaked into the timber beams and wooden floors—but we was used to it by then. I won’t say we were sorry but, for a while, we had been more than just mindless cogs in the machine that churned out newspaper at the other end of the mill. Maybe we were a little disappointed we didn’t have that any more.

I’ve worked from one end of this place to the other, from the steam plant to shipping, but I never really stopped to think about where all the paper we made ended up. New York, London, Tokyo—they was all just names to me. I went to Vegas once for a vacation and found big cities not to my likin’.

Outside of our little town, nobody knew what was in the newspapers they read at the breakfast table or on the subway on the way to work. People crumpled up our paper for packing material, lined their birdcages and litter boxes with it, and even wrapped their fish and chips up in it in some places, or so I’m told.

We spread that disease better’n any old bonfire ever could. Every time someone got a paper cut, or wiped their noses after reading the paper, they caught a dose. Every time someone shook hands with a friend or kissed a lover, they passed it on.

No one knew until the first newly infected dead person crawled out of his grave, so it had plenty of time to spread. By the time they figured out what had happened, it was too late. The tree-huggers never said a word when someone suggested burnin’ the mill to the ground. For all I know, one of them struck the first match. That’s how quickly priorities change.

And now, dear jeezus, they’re everywhere—in every town and city on the planet. Maybe even in Timbuktu, for all I know. The tide has turned against us once more—for good.

ZOMBIE 1

* * *

BEST NEW

ZOMBIE

TALES

Volume Two

Introduction 2

JAMES ROY DALEY

When I heard the loud and mechanical roar, as obnoxious and disquieting as it was, I thought nothing of it. Why would I? My small neighborhood may sit a fair distance away from industrious sounds of the big city but the sound of chain and steel wasn’t completely unheard of. People had trees to trim and fireplaces in need of wood for those oh-so-cold winter nights. A few of my neighbors even had a fire pit behind their homes, giving them every right and reason to use a chainsaw. I didn’t contemplate the grinding racket as it became louder and more obvious––not until the noise was clearly coming from my front porch. Then I thought,
What the hell is going on here? Why is someone running a chainsaw near my house?

I had been sitting on my couch at the time, watching television and eating ice cream; my knees were apart and a bowl was sitting on my lap. Cautiously, almost nervously, I licked my lips, placed the bowl on the coffee table, and stood up. The saw was louder than ever, insulting the very essence of what a quiet borough was all about. The door was approached with forced footsteps and my hand was placed on the knob with an equal amount of concern. Before I had a chance to turn my wrist, the noise doubled in volume and the door started shaking. The knob began rattling. The pictures hanging on the wall next to me began bopping around like they were in a dance competition. I stepped back with my mouth flopping open. A moment passed and my knees began shaking. I yelled
something
, but Lord only knows what that
something
may have been. And just as the blade began making its way through the door––tearing apart the doorknob, the lock, and everything that was around it––the truth of the situation collided with my limited intelligence like a medicine ball in the stomach.

H. P. Lovecraft was here. He came back to finish what he started.

I guess this is a good time to point out that I already had one run-in with H. P., and I don’t mind telling you that I didn’t enjoy the experience
at all
. He mulched my hand apart with a blender, and he warned me that he’d return if…if…