Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (76 page)

“This man who had been a priest was not certain about Heaven, but he was most definite about Hell. Yes, Hell was the Truth. Hell was for the dead.

“But when we turn this Earth of ours into Hell, there is no need for the dead to go below.

“Why should they bother?

“And canst thou doubt that much of this ball of mud upon which we dwell is today hell, Comrade? With each new war and each new and better way of making war, there is more and more hell and so we have more and more inhabitants of hell with us.

“And of course, no surprise, they have their hungers. They are demons. At least that is what some might call them, though I myself seldom think to call them anything. And the food of demons is human flesh. It is a simple thing, really.”

“‘The Living Dead,’ maybe that’s what somebody would call them. Well, hell, don’t you think that would make some newspaperman just ecstatic? It would be bigger than ‘Lindy in Paris!’ Bigger than “

“And thou dost believe such a newspaper story could be printed? And perhaps the
Book of the Living Dead
could be written? And perhaps a motion picture of the Living Dead as well, with Buster Keaton, perhaps? Comrade Adam, such revelation would topple the world order.

“Perhaps someday the world will be ready for such awful knowledge, Comrade Adam.

“For now, it is more than enough that those of us who know of it must know of it, thank you very kindly.

“And with drink, and with women, and with war, and with whatever gives us comfort, we must try not to think over much about what it is we know.”

A day later, Paco thought it would be safe to leave the hole in the side of the mountain. They were spotted by an armored car full of fascists. A bullet passed through Paco’s lung. It was a mortal shot.

“Bad luck, Paco,” Adam Nichols said. He put a bullet into the old man’s brain and went on alone.

X

I am for god’s sake 61 years old and I am going to die because of occluded arteries or because of a cirrhotic liver or because of an aneurysm in brain or belly waiting to go pop, or because of some damn thing––and when I die I wish to be dead to be dead and that is all.

“––a series of twelve. We’ve often had good results––

and, believe me, I am not asking for Jesus to make me a sunbeam,

I am not asking for heaven in any way, shape, or form.

Gentlemen, when I die I wish to be dead.

––particularly with depression. There are several factors, of course––”

I’m looking for dead, that’s DEAD, and I don’t want to be a goddamn carnival freak show act and man is just a little lower than the angels and pues y nada and you get older and you get confused and you become afraid.

“We’ll begin tomorrow––”

no bloody chance because now the world is hell and if you doubt it, then you don’t know the facts, Gentlemen. No bloody chance.

We ended the war by dropping hell on Nagasaki and on Hiroshima, and we opened up Germany and discovered all those hells, and during the siege of Stalingrad, the living ate the dead, and tata, Gentlemen, turnabout is fair play, and we’re just starting to know the hells that good old Papa Joe put together no bloody chance and we’re not blameless, oh, no, ask that poor nigger hanging burning from the tree, ask the Rosenbergs who got cooked up nice and brown, ask––Welcome to hell, and how do you like it now, Gentlemen?

When the world is hell, the dead walk.

XI

When they returned to Ketchum, Idaho on June 30, the old man was happy. Anyone who saw him will tell you. He was not supposed to drink because of his antidepressant medication, but he did drink. It did not affect him badly. He sang several songs. One was
“La Quince Brigada,”
from the Spanish Civil War. He sang loudly and offkey; he made a joyful racket. He said one of the great regrets of his life was that he had never learned to play the banjo.

Later, he had his wife, Mary, put on a Burl Ives record on the Webcor phonograph. It was a 78,
“The Riddle Song.”
He listened to it several times.

How can there be a cherry

that has no stone?

How can there be a chicken

that has no bone?

How can there be a baby

with no crying?

Mary asked if the record made him sad.

No, he said, he was not sad at all. The record was beautiful. If there are riddles, there are also answers to riddles.

So, so then, I have not done badly. Some good stories, some good books. I have written well and truly. I have sometimes failed, but I have tried. I have sometimes been a foolish man, and even a smallminded or meanspirited one, but I have always been a man, and I will end as a man.

* * *

It was early and he was the only one up. The morning of Sunday, July 2, was beautiful. There were no clouds. There was sunshine.

He went to the front foyer. He liked the way the light struck the oakpaneled walls and the floor. It was like being in a museum or in a church. It was a well-lighted place and it felt clean and airy.

Carefully, he lowered the butt of the Boss shotgun to the floor. He leaned forward. The twin barrels were cold circles in the scarred tissue just above his eyebrows.

He tripped both triggers.

The Finger

MATT HULTS

1.

Through some ironic twist of fate, the phone call from the morgue came while Jim Cooley sat watching Frankenstein on one of the cable channels.

“It’s me,” Stuart said when Jimmy picked up the receiver. “I got one. How fast can you get down here?”

Jimmy straightened up in his seat, letting the half-eaten bag of Crispy Pork Bits fall to the trailer’s floor. “Hot damn, Stu, are you serious?” he asked. “When’d he come in? Where’d they find him—”

“I’ll fill you in on the goddamn details when you get here,” Stuart interrupted. “Harrington just went out to lunch, so we have less than an hour to do this.”

Jimmy continued to smile as he replaced the handset, then slapped his hands together with a jovial whoop of delight. “Hot shit!” he cheered. “The little bastard did it!” He jumped up from the couch and grabbed his jean jacket off the wall hook as he hurried out the door.

2.

Three inches of rainwater sloshed along the gutters and burbled around the storm drains as Jimmy guided his rusty Mustang down the alley that serviced the back side of the Hewitt County Municipal Building. The parking area at this end of the lot boasted twenty spaces, but only two other vehicles currently occupied the asphalt; Stuart Wyllie’s dented red Honda and a 1988 Ford that made up the third unit in the HCPD’s trio of squad cars.

Jimmy parked next to the sunken driveway that gave access to the lower loading bay of the building and got out. The rain continued to come down like a busted water main, soaking his shoulders and hair as he ran to the back door.

He rapped on the steel. “Yo, Stu? Open up, man!”

He knocked again when no one answered, letting his gaze flick to the old squad car as he waited. A smile crept onto his face when he thought of when he’d etched his initials in the vinyl on the rear of the driver’s seat back when the car had been new.

The door clicked and flew open.

“What the hell?” Stuart asked. “I never told you to knock!”

The kid glanced around like a mouse in a cat kennel as Jimmy stepped past him, into a green-tiled hallway outside the morgue office.

“I’m due back at the hospital as soon as Doctor Harrington returns,” Stuart reminded him. “We don’t have much time!”

“Don’t shit yourself,” Jimmy told him. “Now, what do you got for me?”

Stuart eased the door into its frame before speaking, and when he did, he kept his voice low. “Mexican male, no ID. Sheriff Picket said a trucker found the body under the I-30 overpass around four o’clock yesterday morning. He’s guessing the guy’s an illegal thumbing his way north.”

Stuart ushered him inside the empty office, toward a door across the room. “We got him fresh,” he said, snatching a manila folder off the desk as they passed it. “Harrington pronounced the cause of death as heart failure two hours after they brought him in, and we just got the toxicology and blood work reports back from HCMC: negative across the board; aside from being dead, he’s as healthy as a horse.”

“Ah, man, this is friggin’
perfect
!” Jimmy agreed.

Stuart pushed through the door of the autopsy room and led the way past the central operating table and body hoist. Jimmy shivered as the first drops of adrenaline hit his veins. His neck hairs prickled on end the way they did in his childhood, when his mother would drag him to the doctor’s office with an ear infection or pneumonia. Cold sweat sheathed his palms as his eyes drifted over the various items in the room: the table, the scales, the shiny stainless steel containers. The drive over had been easy enough—even a bit exciting—but now his emotions sobered as the reality of what awaited him began to sink in.

Stuart unlocked another door, and they stepped into the cooler. Six stainless steel storage lockers took up the far wall, but only one displayed an information card in the holder on the exterior of the door.

“This him?” Jimmy asked.

Stuart gestured to the locker’s handle. “Be my guest.”

Jimmy reached for the handle but stopped short before his fingers touched the metal. He glanced to Stuart, to the purple latex gloves he wore, and with a smirk of self-admiration, he slipped the cuff of his jacket over his hand. “Can’t be too careful.”

He opened the door and rolled out the retractable table.

The corpse had already been packaged in a black body bag for its trip to the Hewitt County Medical Center, where it would await cremation if nothing came up on a fingerprint check, or if nobody claimed the body.

Still using his jacket cuff, Jimmy took hold of the zipper and opened the top third. With a final glance at Stuart, he reached up with both hands and parted the two halves of the bag to reveal a bloodless stump where the man’s head should’ve been.

He placed the manila folder he’d grabbed on the dead man’s chest, flipping it open. A second later, he produced an ink tray from the pocket of his lab coat.

Jimmy lingered at a distance for another moment, then moved forward again. He gave a fleeting glance to the shredded mess of torn muscle and broken bones in the bag—all that remained of the cadaver’s neck—then refocused his attention on Stuart as he held up the man’s right arm and dabbed his blue-gray fingers on the ink-soaked felt of the tray. The top form in the stack of papers Stuart had opened contained two rows of sequential square boxes, each labeled for the digits of the human hand. Starting with the row marked “Right,” he pressed the man’s fingers into the appropriate spaces one at a time, rolling them from side to side to transfer their impressions. He then repeated the procedure for the left hand, all except for the smallest finger.

For that box, he dabbed his own left pinky in the ink and rolled it on the paper.