Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (42 page)

If what?

I couldn’t remember.

While my mind tried to unravel the mystery of what he said, the door swung open in a cloud of sawdust and wood splinters. I saw the chainsaw and I stepped back with my arms held out like a man balancing himself on a log. ‘Arms,’ of course, being a
loose
term, what with one of my arms ending at the elbow thanks to my last encounter with Mr. Lovecraft.

I heard his voice mingled within the sounds of the machinery before I saw his face.

“Zombies!” he screamed. “More goddamn zombies!”

I tripped. If it happened in a movie I would’ve been thinking,
Yeah right! As if!

Truth may be stranger than fiction some of the time, but life can be filled with enough clichés to make the worst Hollywood writer cringe in disgust. I
tripped
. Tripped over a fake plastic plant that had been collecting dust in the same spot for the past ten years. I won’t say that I felt stupid; it’s only
now
that I feel like an idiot for falling down. At the time my feelings were not traveling the embarrassment highway; the terror growing inside my mind was coming together in a way that blocked out all other emotions.
H. P. Lovecraft had returned!

It hit me. He said,
Make sure your zombie book is amazing.
That’s what he said. He said,
Make sure the book is amazing or he’d saw my empty head off!

Oh shit!

Wasn’t the first volume good? I
thought
it was good! It got great reviews…the writers are incredible…everyone tells me that the book looks beautiful… So why the hell is he back? What did I do wrong?

He stepped into my home and lowered the saw. His suit was clean and his tie was thin. I saw his face––his skinny, pale as a ghost, face. His eyes were darker than most and sat deep within their sockets. His slender nose was crinkled in a way that suggested that he was disgusted with me. The grin that haunted his lips evinced the emotion of hate.

I was in trouble, very serious trouble.

I said, “Hello Howard. What brings you here?”

Before the question tumbled across my trembling lips he was standing above me, revving the saw’s engine. His pupils narrowed into pinpricks.

“How
could
you?!” he shouted. “Did I not teach you anything? Are your thoughts utterly illogical, asinine, and incongruous? Are you completely moronic? You imperceptive, dimwitted, Neanderthal! You absurd, idiotic, pre-Gravettian, Blytt-Sernander, cavern-dweller!”

Drowning in my fear, I had no idea what half of those words meant. Did he make up a new language every time he spoke? Thinking about his fiction, it seemed very likely.

“You heard me! Your releasing a
second
zombie book; isn’t that right?”

“Of course I am! You can’t put out a volume one without a volume two! Did you really think I was going to release a volume one without a volume two?” He revved the engine and I screamed: “Don’t kill me! You should have known it was coming!”

For a moment he looked stumped. I can only assume that conflicting thoughts swirled inside his mind. Later I would come to the conclusion that my logic had saved my life. Not that it kept me safe. Or in one piece.

H. P. spat on me. The last time I saw him he spat on the floor; this time the wad of mucus hit me in the face, just below my left eye.

Chuckling, he said, “Leg it is.”

He moved faster than a shark, and the saw came screaming towards me. Before I knew it would happen, my ankle was being chewed apart and blood was splashing the walls in generous amounts. My single hand pounded against the floor as pain washed over me like an electrical current. I heard the bone grind and I felt my muscles tear. When I pulled my leg away from the blade my foot didn’t come with it. It just sat on the floor, bleeding like a stuck pig. The last thing I remember is that crazy son-of-a-bitch whispering something in my ear. I wish like hell I could remember what he said. I have a feeling it was important.

* * *

A
hem.

Let me clear my throat.

Dear literate zombie fans; my name is James Roy Daley. What you’re looking at is a little idea of mine, brought to life by the power of hard work. If you’ve read the first volume you know what I’m doing here. I’m putting together the best zombie tales I can get my hands on. If you haven’t read the first volume, I figure you’re missing out. Volume one has some great stories. Ray Garton’s
Zombie Love
is a real treat, Matt Hult’s
Feeding Frenzy
is probably the strangest zombie story ever written, and John L. French wrote a tale called
Paradise Denied
that is so far removed from anything conventional that it belongs in a genre of its own. Plunking those with writers such as Kealan Patrick Burke, Jonathan Mayberry, Jeff Strand, Bev Vincent, Kim Paffenroth, and…well…you get the point. Great writers tend to make great books. And the book you’re currently reading is loaded with great writers.

First up, an amazing story by a very good friend of mine: Rio Youers.

Enjoy...

Bury Me Not

RIO YOUERS

She had known this day would come—had been prepared for it, every time she opened the front door for the last two and a half years: a perfect stillness, as if this iota of the world had ceased to be, and was suspended in its own time and place; a chill feeling, unmistakably the discontinuance of something that once was (an
endness
, she thought, and that peculiar word––
endness
—fell through her mind and shattered against her soul); and, of course, the smell. It stained the air. Abused goodness. Nothing natural.

He’s gone,
she thought.

Michelle Weston braced herself and stepped into the hallway. She covered her mouth against the smell, took two trembling steps, and jumped when the wind caught the front door and slammed it with an angry sound.

“Hello…Mr. Vandenhoff?”

She didn’t expect a reply. She didn’t get one.

The hallway was gloomy, with faded walls, an old-fashioned dial phone on a small table in the corner, and Mr. Vandenhoff’s brown leather shoes on the floor—shoes he would never wear again (unless the undertaker chose to bury him in them). The dining room was on the right. Nothing in there but an empty table and a cabinet that housed Mr. Vandenhoff’s many humanitarian awards, along with several photographs of him and various luminaries, although the only faces she recognized were those of Nelson Mandela and the Princess of Wales. The kitchen was ahead, on the left, with the living room on the right. Judging from the smell, Michelle knew that she would find him in one of these rooms. Maybe he had died waiting for the toast to pop up, and was sprawled on the kitchen floor, as putrid as spoiled fruit. Or he was in the living room, sitting in his armchair in the exact position in which he had died, with Monday’s edition of the
Wall Street Journal
in his hands, open at the editorials.

This latter was almost the case; Mr. Vandenhoff was
indeed sitting in his armchair, but he didn’t have the
Wall Street Journal
in his hands. He was actually holding the remote control for the TV, and appeared to be aiming the device at the screen. His thumb was poised over the power button. He had died before he could switch it on.

“Oh,” Michelle said. She had been expecting it—of course she had, but it hit her hard, all the same. Her legs weakened and she needed the support of the wall for a moment. Her instinct was to take several deep breaths, but the air was so foul that her throat contracted. She covered her mouth and gagged again.

Outside,
she thought.
Fresh air.

She crossed the kitchen and yanked on the sliding door that opened onto the back garden. Locked. Of course. She fumbled with the catch, coughing again, and ripped open the door. Fresh air—massive, invigorating lungfuls. She all but threw herself into the sky, like a man on fire diving into a pool of water.

Thank God. Oh my goodness.
Her head span; the air was a drug and she hit it again, nostrils flaring.
Oh my…

She dropped into one of the garden chairs and waited for composure, which took longer than expected, given that she had seen dead bodies before: two grandparents, an aunt, and a friend who died of leukemia. But they had all been in their coffins, dressed splendidly, their faces adorned with cosmetics. They looked unreal, like waxworks. It was hard to imagine that the hearts inside those soulless bodies had ever been beating. Mr. Vandenhoff, however…he looked very real. Very dead.

Deep breaths.

Michelle blinked. Better. Not great. She wasn’t ready to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” by any stretch of the imagination, but she at least felt ready to do what needed to be done next: call Mr. Vandenhoff’s doctor. He would confirm what she already knew, and then contact the funeral home. Mr. Vandenhoff’s family in Holland would be notified, and he would be buried according to his wishes. The end.

She nodded and took a few more measured breaths. The world balanced. She could hear a dog barking, a lawnmower purring, a jet plane cutting through the clouds. The houses in Mr. Vandenhoff’s neighborhood continued as normal. They ate their meals and showered. They watched
American Idol
and surfed the Internet…all completely unaware of the dead man in the little yellow house on the corner. This neighborhood—microcosm of the western world—epitomized the dichotomy between life and death. Although for Michelle, this division was about to become indistinct.

It started when Mr. Vandenhoff’s TV switched on.

To begin with, Michelle thought the sound was coming from next door, but soon realized that it was much closer—that it was, in fact, coming from Mr. Vandenhoff’s living room. An English accent, clearly a reporter, talking about relief work in Afghanistan. The BBC World News. Michelle knew this because it was Mr. Vandenhoff’s favorite channel. He watched it all the time.

He turned on the TV,
she thought, and her heart made a fat, slow movement in her chest. She recalled his dead hand clasping the remote, his thumb hovering over the power button.
It can’t be. There’s no…

Deep breaths.

Michelle stood up and approached the sliding doors—got a blast of the smell again and staggered backward. She counted to three, took a deep breath, and stepped into the house.

The TV played to a dead man…except that the dead man had moved ever so slightly since the last time she had seen him; his thumb had dropped an inch or so, and was pressed firmly on the remote’s power button.

“Freaky,” Michelle said. She had heard that dead people could twitch or move suddenly, even belch. Something to do with a build-up of decomposition gases, or a chemical reaction in the nerves. But even so, turning on the TV was all-out freaky. She inched into the living room, her legs unsteady. The screen flashed images from all over the world: Iraq, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Burma: a collage of disaster. Mr. Vandenhoff had traveled to all these places. He had formed charities and provided compassion, education, and comfort. Now they danced in his lifeless eyes, a swirl of color, like oil on water.

She flicked off the TV.

Silence. Almost…

Flies buzzed and flicked across Mr. Vandenhoff’s body. She was no doctor, but he had obviously been dead for some time. The flies were something of a giveaway. The stench, too. There were also signs of putrefaction; his skin was greenish-gray, and his face bloated. There was darker coloring in his lower forearms and jowls—the blood no longer circulating, settling in the cold tissue like rain on a windowsill. As she watched, a fly landed on his swollen face and crawled across his eyeball.

Michelle swallowed hard. Her throat clicked and rasped, still clenched against the smell. It was time to call the doctor. His number was in the address book, next to the telephone in the hallway. She turned and started to walk away, but stopped cold when the TV flicked on again.

That didn’t just happen.

She pivoted on one heel. Her heart was a raging, crashing ocean. The BBC World News played on the screen, and Mr. Vandenhoff’s neck creaked stiffly as he turned to look at her.

“
Begraaf me niet,
” he said, speaking in his native Dutch. Thick yellow pus dribbled over his lower lip. “
Ik bien niet dood.
”

The fly still crawled across his eyeball.

* * *

Michelle had first met Mr. Vandenhoff four years ago. She was eighteen at the time, working part time at coffee shop in her tiny hometown. He would come in at the same time every morning, with the
Wall Street Journal
under his arm, and order the same thing: a large black coffee and a blueberry muffin. She’d sometimes see him shuffling down the sidewalk, and would have his order prepared by the time he stepped through the door. He paid with the exact change, and always gave her a one-dollar tip.