Murdermouth: Zombie Bits Read online

  A collection of zombie stories by best-selling author Scott Nicholson, including the never-before-published “A Farewell to Arms.” Includes a short story by Jack Kilborn and a survival scorecard by Jonathan Maberry. Bonus material includes the script for the Murdermouth comic book.

  Murdermouth:

  Zombie Bits

  By Scott Nicholson

  Copyright ©2010 Scott Nicholson

  Published by Haunted Computer Books at Smashwords

  www.HauntedComputer.com

  Follow Scott: www.twitter.com/hauntedcomputer

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1. A Farewell to Arms

  2. Bleeding Ink

  3. Need

  4. Carnival Knowledge

  5. Murdermouth

  6. Eat Me

  7. A Matter of Taste (Jack Kilborn)

  8. The Meek

  9. Comic script: Murdermouth #1

  10. Zombie Apocalypse Survival Scorecard (Jonathan Maberry)

  11. You’ll Never Walk Alone

  About the author

  Other books by Scott Nicholson

  INTRODUCTION

  Zombies.

  Gotta love ‘em.

  My first exposure to zombies was in those old EC and 1970’s horror comics, the ones with the short, garish tales with a twist at the end that was never all that surprising. House of Mystery, Tales from the Crypt, Weird War Tales, I gobbled them up as fast as I could collect drink bottles on the side of the road. Back then, three or four drink bottles could get you a comic book or pack of baseball cards. That’s hard to believe now.

  Which is one of many reasons I think the apocalypse has already happened and we just don’t know it yet.

  But zombies really staggered into my life when I saw Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie.” I was a freshman in college, with a little cash and independence, making my own decisions for a change. Not good.

  I went to the movie by myself, for whatever reason. And I sat there alternately horrified and fascinated. I was most captivated by the persistence of the zombies—that “Never say die” attitude and the way they kept coming no matter how many limbs they lost.

  Driven by a single, simple purpose.

  Really, I guess that encapsulated the whole zombie love affair for me—it cut everything down to survival of the fittest, nature at its most basic. Kill or be killed. Live to be eaten another day.

  Of course, volumes of academic hoo-hockery have been written about the zombie as social metaphor, but that one works for me.

  I went back, again by myself, and watched Fulci’s “Zombie” the next night. I did cover my eyes at one point, but obviously the addiction was strong. To this day, it is the only movie I have ever watched back-to-back like that.

  And that’s saying something, considering “Night of the Living Dead” is one of my all-time favorite movies of any kind. Besides the taunting “They’re coming to get you, Bahhh-bara!,” there is not a single laugh in that whole Romero classic. It takes itself deadly seriously, which is fairly rare in modern horror films and books.

  My early attempts at zombie fiction were from the first-person viewpoint of the zombie, imagining some vestige of humanity inside those shambling, ravenous creatures. They are the Other, but they are us.

  And it’s that otherness that I love to explore in fiction, how we relate to one another as human beings and how that gets challenged—in “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” there is the usual survival scenario that explores people under pressure, but also sneaks in a twisted version of a boy’s faith. “Bleeding Ink” is informed by my real-life profession as a reporter, and how we’d probably respond to an undead attack. “Need,” “Carnival Knowledge” and “Murdermouth” are related stories that hinge on the “turning” and how zombies might view the Other—when humans are the Other.

  And, of course, zombies lend themselves to humorous treatment, as seen in the zombie-sheep tale “The Meek,” “Eat Me,” and Jack Kilborn’s “A Matter of Taste.”

  Zombie superstar Jonathan Maberry (Patient Zero, Marvel Zombies) offers a checklist to determine whether you’d survive or not in the event of the unthinkable—which, if you’re reading this, you probably think about far more than you should. The checklist originally appeared in his non-fiction handbook Zombie: CSU, an essential tome for the discerning zombie head.

  Jack Kilborn, also known to the world as indie revolutionary J.A. Konrath, offers a bonus peek at his novel Endurance—while it’s not a zombie novel, it provides more-than-sufficient terror factor and bodily fluids.

  I’ve also included the script for the Murdermouth comic, illustrated by Derlis Santacruz, who provided the cover art. We have a special offer for you:

  Donate $25 to help produce the full-color comic and you will be drawn in the comic as a zombie! Yes, you can be a brain-munching, vacant-eyed moron until the end of time and get a file of the panel to print out or stick on your favorite Web hangout. How cool is that? Details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/murdermouth.com.

  In the end, I offer this previously unpublished tale, “A Farewell to Arms,” written especially for this collection.

  So mark me down as a fan of the “slow” zombies. It’s not where you start, it’s how you finish.

  --Scott Nicholson

  Autumn, 2010

  A Farewell to Arms

  By Scott Nicholson

  The barn had everything you’d want in a place to die.

  Some soft, golden hay, a few chickens down below if you liked your eggs raw, an old hand-operated water pump that sucked cold water from an artesian well deep beneath the soil. It was quiet, except for the chickens, and surrounded on all sides by unkempt but level pastures. Not a living soul in sight.

  No unliving souls, either.

  The little farmhouse at the end of the dirt road had burned days before. Casey had kicked around in the charred chunks, looking for anything useful like canned vegetables or metal tools, but all he’d found were some coins and a handful of bone fragments. The fragments bore teeth marks.

  Leaning against a hay bale in the loft of the barn, he tossed one of the blackened coins in the air.

  “Heads or tails,” he said.

  “Heads,” Maleah said.

  Casey let the coin hit the hard boards of the floor. It rolled until it found a crack, then fell through into the dried manure below.

  “Guess it won’t be so easy,” Casey said.

  “Did you think it would be?”

  Seven days on the road, and they’d developed an uneasy conversational style. Casey, the hardened optimist and Maleah, the determined cynic. They might have made a good comedy team. The Belushi and Akroyd of the apocalypse. The audience would be dying with laughter.

  Beyond the pastures, the gentle hills rolled in September splendor. The ocher, purple, and scarlet of the changing leaves were like a rumpled patchwork quilt. If not for the thin threads of smoke on the horizon, then it might have passed for an idyllic autumn day in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  “You never told me where you were headed,” Casey said.

  “Is anybody headed anywhere?”

  Casey was annoyed by her habit of making a question out of everything. He had as many questions as the next guy. Like, “What the hell happened?” and “Why is God such a heartless bastard?” But did you hear him going on and on about it? No. He played the cards you dealt him. “I mean, before all this. You had a family, right?”

  Maleah twisted her wedding ring. She hadn’t mentioned her husband. It was another of those questions that Casey had kept to himself. God was heartless, but adultery was a sin, and the less said about that, the better.

  “I was going to Charlotte,” Maleah said. “I thoug
ht I’d fly to the Bahamas. But they’d already closed the airport.”

  “They’re probably in the Bahamas by now anyway.”

  “Probably everywhere.”

  “Arctic, maybe. Do people live up above Canada? Maybe if it’s too cold, they can’t move.”

  “They’re dead. I doubt they feel the cold.”

  Casey stood and walked to the shelf where hand tools, farm supplies, and buckets of screws and nails huddled in dusty piles. The wall was covered with dried-out strips of harness, yellow rope, baling wire, and chains. A couple of shovels, a hoe, and a blunt, rusty axe hung from ten-penny nails. A dented trash can in the corner was half full of dried feed corn. Casey scooped a palm full of kernels and tossed them through a hay chute. Below, chickens squawked and tussled over the grain.

  Maybe they would cook a chicken first. Casey had killed chickens as a kid while visiting his grandfather’s farm. Well, he hadn’t actually been the one to bring down the blade, but he was there when the chickens ran around, frantic and flapping, their heads lying with beaks opening and closing, probably asking questions of the god of the chickens.

  He could do it. Bring the blade down quick—that’s what Grampy Willers said. You owed it to them to do it clean. “Painless that way,” Grampy insisted, as if he knew the feelings of chickens.

  Casey tore a strip of tar paper from the roll beside the shelf. He carried it to the window, which was just a square opening covered with chicken wire. He spread out the strip of tar paper and fished a small can of pork and beans from his pocket. He placed the can on the black paper so the sun would heat it up.

  “Pork and beans again?” Maleah said.

  Beans made him fart. Maleah said something the first time, as if manners still mattered. And for a while, Casey would walk a little bit away, release his gas, and sidle back over, barely missing a step. Then he decided this was no time to be uptight about farting, so he let them rip whenever he felt like it.

  “I thought about cooking up a chicken,” Casey said. “We’d have to make a fire, and they might smell the meat.”

  “They smell the meat anyway.”

  Maleah, sitting on a bale of hay, pulled an apple from her satchel. She rubbed it against the thigh of her jeans and took a crisp, wet bite. Chomping with her mouth open, she said, “Wonder what—happened—to the—people—in—”

  “You know what happened.” Casey was mad now. “It doesn’t matter what people, where, or when. You know what happened.”

  She finished chewing before she spoke again. “Have you seen anybody get bit? Up close, I mean?”

  Casey didn’t want to remember, but it was one of those things. The soldiers had already broken ranks, at last recognizing a new chain of command. But they still clustered with their guns, suspicious and scared and clinging to the dregs of honor and duty. They were shooting anything that moved, holed up in a restaurant in downtown Asheville, and Casey had nearly taken a bullet when he broke in through the service bay to prowl the kitchen.

  While he was explaining himself at gunpoint, a walkie talkie crackled, informing the soldiers that Sector 37 had been overrun. Casey didn’t know anything about sectors. He’d waited until the soldiers evacuated, then cleaned out the refrigerator. Those were the good old days, the immediate aftermath, when the power was out but most things were still close to normal.

  If you didn’t count the zombies.

  Casey had thought about waiting out whatever needed to be waited out, right there in the restaurant, but when he opened the walk-in cooler to look for bacon, one of the zombies had staggered out, mouth wet with gore. Casey had shoved the door closed and the zombie had hammered on it from the inside, too stupid to push the little handle and get out.

  So, technically, he hadn’t seen that mutilated, screaming waitress get bitten, but he’d seen plenty enough to imagine it all.

  “Saw some in Asheville,” he said. “In the early days.”

  “Asheville is nice,” Maleah said. “I took the kids to the art museum there. In the old days.”

  Casey noticed that time was measured in days lately: Old Days, Early Days, Final Days. If you liked years, well, you were pretty much in the wrong time. Simple as that.

  “Were they with you in Charlotte?”

  “No. They went with their dad. Figured a cruise ship was safer. Things were . . . you know how people get under stress.”

  Yep. Casey knew. His mother was in Raleigh. Even if you had a car, you couldn’t get gas, and even if you had gas, all the roads were blocked with broken-down cars. A motorcycle might have done some good, but those had been snatched up by people with rifles. So Casey put his mother out of his mind. Simple as that.

  “That where you got the bruise?” Casey said, taking the can of pork and beans to her. They weren’t warm yet, but at least he’d tried. He flipped the tab, peeled the lid, and gave her the can.

  She touched the side of her face before taking the can. “No,” she said, so fast that the lie was out there hanging in the air like a bean fart. “I banged into a door.”

  “Mob scenes,” Casey said, feeding the lie a little so she could relax. Anxiety was bad for the digestion and he never should have asked.

  She stared into the greasy sheen riding the top of the can’s contents. “You’d like to think we would have done better.”

  Casey nodded, and then realized she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring into the brown liquid as if reliving some callous atrocity, a kid knocked off his bike in the rush to escape them, a woman tossing her baby at one to buy a little more time to run. Or maybe someone leaving a waitress trapped in a walk-in cooler so the zombie would eat her instead of him.

  Things like that. Things you didn’t want to remember.

  She was already a goner. You couldn’t have saved her. That’s the story you stick with.

  He told her that version, the one where he was almost a hero.

  Maleah fished her knife around in the can and came up with a few beans. “I can’t eat meat anymore,” she said.

  “Too bad,” he said. “I was thinking about those chickens.”

  As if volunteering for the roasting spit, a rooster crowed, the sound cracked and piercing in the pastoral calm. Casey glanced out the window, measuring the sun against the horizon. Maybe half an hour until dark.

  Not that they cared about dark. They marched and munched all the same, full-time hunger, plenty to do and forever to do it in.

  But dark made a big difference if you counted on sight instead of smell. Zombies did their best work at night because the prey was more vulnerable. Nature’s rules were pretty simple. Survival of the fittest.

  “We could keep going north,” Casey said.

  “And make Canada in, what, two years?”

  “You never know. There have to be pockets. Soldiers and the government and police. Somebody had to be ready for this.”

  “How could you be ready for this?”

  “Lakes.” Casey was getting annoyed, and he didn’t like the whispering in his head. With the waitress, it had been easy. She was a stranger. Just another wide-eyed, open-mouthed rack of ribs, half his size. Easy to shove into the walk-in cooler.

  But this woman . . . well, they’d gotten to know each other.

  “And what do we do if we find a lake?” She spoke around a mouthful of beans, and a piece of pork clung to her lips. In her hunger, she’d already given up her newfound vegetarianism.

  “A boat, maybe. They probably can’t swim.”

  “And we live on fish?”

  He looked at the ax on the wall, and the chains. The farmer had probably killed his hogs in this barn, slit their throats and hung them up below, their corpses dangling from chains while he worked out the innards. Blood dripping onto the packed carpet of hay and manure, flies orbiting in a red frenzy.

  “Hard losing your kids that way, huh?” he said.

  “I haven’t lost them. They’re out there somewhere.”

  Sure they were. Just like his mother and t
he waitress and his best friend Tyler who’d climbed a tree with a shotgun and a week’s worth of cheese and crackers and a twelve-pack, determined to wait them out. Everyone was out there somewhere. Everyone was doing just fine.

  Casey pulled the cell phone out of his pocket. He flipped it open to check the signal. Whatever had knocked out the electricity must have messed with the phones, too. Terrorists, he’d heard. Well, there was a new kind of terror to worry about

  The battery probably had another day or so. It meant nothing but comfort. A last link with the way things used to be. He resisted the urge to click through his numbers. It would only make him think about how those people might have been caught.

  Maleah wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her pumpkin-colored blouse. She was a redhead and the colors didn’t go well together.

  “Want some?” she asked, holding out the can.

  “I’m not real hungry,” he said.

  He’d found a rifle in Hickory, a furniture-factory town that had been dying long before the end of the world arrived. The rifle had some icky gel on the shoulder stock, and Casey had worried he’d catch an infection from it. But the rifle was a single-shot, low-caliber. He didn’t know much about guns but he’d fired at one of them. The zombie had been digging in a bundle of clothes on the far end of the street.

  At least, he was pretty sure it was a zombie.

  Some guy in a cowboy hat told him the next day you had to shoot them in the head or it was a waste of good ammo. The cowboy seemed to be having the time of his life, tooling around in an open-top Jeep with big tires. The Jeep bristled with barbed wire, and in the passenger seat were half a dozen guns. The cowboy offered him a ride, said they could go cross-country and not worry about the clogged roads, but he was headed toward the zombies, not away from them.

  North. That was what everybody else said to do.

  No reason, really. People just had to go somewhere, and having a direction was almost as good as having a reason to live.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” he said.

  She touched the top button of her blouse, as if she were undecided whether she would undress again. Or maybe just embarrassed. Things you did in the dark were easier to forget happened. Maybe it was even easier to die in the dark.