Sven the Zombie Slayer (9 page)

Sven looked at the bar in his hand, then around at the bloody mess in his yard. The bar wouldn’t be enough on its own to make up for it. Sven picked up four of the ten pound plates on the ground and put them on one end of the bar. He clipped them, then let the bar hang from his right hand like a club. It swung at his side as he waited.

Bob shuffled closer. It’d be nice to swat at Bob with his own tennis racquet, Sven thought, but that meant touching it, and Sven didn’t want to touch anything Bob had touched. The bicep bar would have to do. As Sven patiently waited for Bob to shuffle closer, more screams came, some distant, and some not.

23

Bob was close enough now. Sven took a breath, steadied himself, squeezed the hell out of the bar, and swung. The plates on the end of the bar hit Bob square on the left temple. Bob’s head exploded into a shower of dry, grey flesh, covering the hedge behind him. The headless body stumbled on toward an open-mouthed Sven for a few dragging steps, then collapsed. The blow had left Bob’s headless body with a dry stump at the neck.

But why not a wet stump? Wasn’t it supposed to be a wet stump? Sven’s junior high school math teacher, Mr. Newman, had loved to threaten students by saying, “I’m gonna rip your head off and spit down the wet stump.” Sven didn’t understand the gravity of this threat until years later—until now.

Looking at the dry stump, Sven wondered what Mr. Newman would have to say about this. He had been a good math teacher—one of the best. Mr. Newman would know what to do with Bob.

Sven shook his head and retreated from the flashback of his junior high school math class, leaving young, puny Sven and his protractor behind.

The headless tennis player’s hands clawed at the ground and his legs still moved like the legs of those wind-up toys when they fall over. Then he was still.

Sven dropped his makeshift club and let out a ragged breath, feeling shaken and confused.

There was a faraway hissing, and then it was closer, and then Sven was back, stepping backward out of the body’s tainted odor. It was Ivan—Ivan was still hissing.

“It’s okay now,” Sven said, and reached back with his left hand to pet Ivan on the head.

“He’s done, his tennis days are over.”

Ivan bit Sven’s finger. Not hard enough to get to the bone, but hard enough to draw blood. Sven winced, pulling his hand away.

“Why’d you—”

Something grabbed Sven’s ankle. He looked down at the hand and understood at once why Ivan had been hissing. It was Bill’s hand, but Bill had been killed, hadn’t he? Sven wriggled his ankle free and turned around, again getting a whiff of the syrupy odor, which a back part of Sven’s brain was starting to connect with the mind and body-numbing effects he’d been experiencing in the past hour.

Most of Bill’s torso was gone. There were exposed ribs and pieces of organs strewn about, but nothing that could hold Bill’s lower half and upper half together. But Bill’s top half was moving, moving away from his lower half! His hands were opening and closing, reaching for Sven’s feet. Bill’s mouth was opening and closing too, the teeth clicking much too hard against each other.

The bottomless mailman looked up at Sven, locking on with his one remaining eye. Like the others Sven had seen so far, the eye was a dull, empty blackness, and it was a relief to look away from it into the empty socket of the missing eye. The mailman inched forward, pulling himself along with his hands and chin, putting distance between the remains of his torso and his torn, motionless legs.

Bill’s mouth ate grass as it gnashed its way to Sven, who knew that it wanted more. It wanted flesh. It wanted Sven’s meaty calf. Sven could feel it in the black stare of the mailman’s remaining eye. Sven stared in utter disbelief as the disconnected top of the mailman kept coming, it was so sickeningly terrible, it was so—Ivan snapped him out of it with a frustrated meow.

Sven shook himself, patted Ivan on the head—to maintain his own grip on reality and not at all to comfort Ivan—and walked to his car. He unlocked the car, threw his gym bag on the passenger seat and set the backpacking Ivan down in the passenger seat’s foot well. Sven turned the key, and the engine started.

“Thank God for that,” Sven said, thankful that bit of horror movie cliché was not coming to pass.

Ivan meowed.

“That would have sucked, if the car hadn’t started.”

Ivan didn’t respond, maybe because it was obvious, or maybe because he was a cat and was beyond such mundane discussion.

Sven rolled the windows down a few inches so he could hear the outside world—the now dying outside world? He didn’t want anything to sneak up on him. He pulled forward so that he could get out from in front of Lars’s car, backed out of the driveway and turned onto
Lewis Mountain Road
, putting the
University
of
Virginia
grounds behind him.

Killed Bill, who was not quite killed all the way through, kept on inching his way across the lawn, forgetting his legs behind him.

24

Jane didn’t have to wait long as she stood turning her knuckles white with the squeezing of the utensils. She had been in the kitchen for what seemed like only a few moments before the sound of dragging footsteps stopped outside the door. Something began to scratch at the door in short, fitful bursts, then stopped.

Jane swallowed, her eyes fixed on the door. Then she scratched the top of her head with her fork and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her knife-wielding hand. She looked at the wine refrigerator and realized that she wanted a drink. It probably wasn’t the best time for one, she thought, but then she changed her mind. It
was
the best time for a drink. How could there ever be a better time?

Jane edged closer to the wine refrigerator. The door of the little refrigerator was facing sideways relative to the door of the kitchen. She wouldn’t have to turn the refrigerator to get a bottle out. That was good.

She held her breath as she put the knife and fork down on top of the refrigerator. She kneeled in front of the wine refrigerator’s door and cracked it open, then listened. She heard nothing, so she opened the door a bit more. Then she listened again. She still heard nothing, so she opened the door farther, just enough to take out a bottle. There was still no noise from outside the kitchen.

Jane reached her hand into the wine refrigerator and closed her hand around the neck of a bottle. She lifted it, and began to pull it out, inch by tedious inch. When she had gotten the bottle halfway out of the refrigerator, the scratching came again, more frantic than before. Jane yelped and almost dropped the bottle, banging it against another bottle in the wine refrigerator. She cursed under her breath, pulled the bottle all the way out, and taking the knife and fork up again, she retreated to the back of the kitchen, clutching the wine bottle and her utensils.

The wine refrigerator sat in front of the kitchen door, its own smaller door ajar. Jane looked at it, but decided she wasn’t going back over there to close it. It was unplugged now anyway.

Abruptly, the scratching grew louder.

Jane set her knife, fork, and bottle down on the counter. She opened a cupboard, stood up on the tips of her toes, and reached in. She took out a large, long-stemmed wine glass, and set it down next to the bottle. Then she looked around the kitchen, trying to remember what came next.

She remembered. She opened a drawer and took out her favorite foil cutter and a corkscrew. The foil cutter was built into a skunk figurine. The corkscrew was an ordinary corkscrew. Jane used the skunk to cut the foil off the top of the bottle, then uncorked the bottle with the corkscrew. The scratching stopped in time with the pulling of the cork.

Jane looked at the skunk and sighed. It had been a gift from Vicky. She was going to help Vicky and everything was going to be alright. She just needed a drink first.

After filling her glass to the brim, Jane took two large gulps and sighed. Then she looked at the bottle. It was a semi-dry Viognier from a local vineyard. Jane thought it was a bit too sweet for semi-dry, but she was sometimes wrong about these things. At that moment, the wine tasted like the most wonderful thing in the world, despite any possible inaccuracies in its avowed sugar content.

Jane picked up her glass again and brought it to her mouth. She took another big gulp, and just as she was in mid-swallow, there was a loud bang on the kitchen door, and then another, along with a tearing, splintering sound. Jane choked, spluttering wine out of her mouth. Some of it went on the floor, some went back in the glass, and some went on her hand, which she had brought up by reflex.

Jane’s mouth dropped open in astonishment when she saw it.

Vicky’s hand was sticking through door, boring its way through a mess of jagged splinters. There were splinters sticking in Vicky’s hand and arm, but that didn’t stop the arm from thrusting in and out of the hole it had made, from turning and twisting and digging out a wider opening for itself.

Then the arm retreated back through the hole, and was gone. It left just a little bit of blood around the splintered wood. Jane was surprised there wasn’t more blood, because it looked like the splinters had cut Vicky up pretty good.

Hyperventilating, Jane picked up the bottle of semi-dry Viognier and began to pour herself a fresh glass. Then she stopped herself. What was the point of that? This was a serious enough occasion to obviate the need for all formalities. Jane brought the bottle to her lips and took a few healthy swigs. Some of the wine dribbled down her lip, and she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.

Then there came more banging, and two sets of Vicky’s fingers were through the hole in the door, pulling at the splinters and rough wood, trying to make the hole bigger.

I have to do something, Jane thought, feeling trapped and hopeless. She looked at the wine bottle for answers and took another swig.

Then she took up the knife and fork again, and took a step toward the door, careful to stay away from Vicky’s probing, excavating hands.

“Stop it Vicky,” Jane said. “Vicky? Do you hear me? You’re very sick, and you have to stop it. Okay? Can you hear me? Are you listening?”

A low, angry moan came through the hole in the door. Or was it a hungry moan?

“Seriously Vicky, I mean it. Stop it, or I’m gonna have to defend myself. I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t make me.”

There was another moan.

“Really, don’t make me. Please?”

Vicky tore a large piece from the middle part of the door. It wasn’t big enough to get through, but at the rate Vicky was tearing through the door, it wouldn’t be long until it was.

Jane knew she had to stop that from happening.

She was feeling the effects of the wine now, and slurred her words. “That’s it Vicky, I’m sorry but I have to.”

Jane brought the fork up and stuck it in Vicky’s left forearm. There was little effect. A drop of what Jane could only interpret as stale blood leaked down one of the fork’s tines, and dropped to the top of the wine refrigerator. Vicky’s hands kept on scraping away, as if Vicky felt nothing. Another chunk of door came away with a hollow rending noise.

Jane shook her head, withdrew the fork, and fork-stabbed Vicky again, in the other arm this time.

That also had no effect, so Jane withdrew the fork again, and fork-stabbed Vicky again, in the shoulder this time—the shoulder that was now peeking through the rapidly enlarging hole in the door. Vicky still didn’t react, and Jane didn’t try to get the fork back this time. She left it sticking out of Vicky’s shoulder, skewering its last weenie dog.

Feeling more light-headed than she should have from the wine, Jane backed deeper into the kitchen. “What am I going to do with you?” She picked up the wine bottle and took a panicky gulp. The wine was getting warmer, and didn’t taste as good as it had when it was cooled to its appropriate drinking temperature.