Murdermouth: Zombie Bits Read online

  “How far is the next town?” she asked.

  “Probably ten miles,” he said.

  He’d just picked a number out of thin air. Ten miles didn’t sound too far, but not close enough for her to want to leave the barn. He didn’t suppose there were a lot of “nexts” left in the world. Only plenty of “lasts.”

  She scraped up the last of the beans with the knife and slid them into her mouth, careful not to cut her tongue. She licked the blade and folded it closed.

  “Chickens might have laid some eggs,” Casey said. He hadn’t looked around too much when they’d entered the barn. There were too many shadowy pens and corn bins, barrels and stacked wooden crates. A rusty tractor was parked at one end of the barn, but Casey hadn’t even bothered to start it. Even at full speed, it wouldn’t outrun them.

  “Bacon would be nice,” Maleah said, forgetting she was almost a vegetarian.

  “And sausage and pancakes and toast. A good cup of coffee. Brewed, not that powdered instant in cold water.”

  She tossed the empty can through the square hole in the floor. The holes were used to throw down bales of hay to the animals. They’d bothered Casey at first, because he imagined ways they might crawl up through them in the night. The wooden door blocking the narrow stairs was heavy and solid, and there was no other easy way in except the holes. But the hayloft was 12 feet above the dirt, and Casey figured holes worked both ways, because they could get out fast if necessary.

  “How many could you fight off if you had to?” she said. She didn’t give him back the knife. She wormed it into the front pocket of her jeans.

  “I don’t know. Two, maybe. Three if I had room.”

  “The one in Asheville, did it touch you?”

  “Not my skin. It grabbed my shirt and tore it. But I got him away before he got close.”

  “Do you feel bad that you couldn’t save her?”

  He shrugged. “She was a goner anyway.”

  Weak. Slow. Trying to help him when she should have been running away.

  Stupid.

  “Well, maybe in a way, you made up for it by finding me.”

  They’d met in the snack section of a convenience store. The front glass had been broken out. She had an armful of potato chip bags and he’d suggested she grab some drinks because she’d soon be thirsty. The beer was warm so he went for Gatorade. The store had been plenty wrecked.

  As they were leaving, he noticed the cash register was open and the bills gone. Some people never changed. Unless they got bit.

  Then they changed plenty.

  The two of them didn’t discuss traveling together. They’d just both started down the same street in the same direction at the same time. A few other people were around, a dark-skinned boy running, one tennis shoe lost, his bare foot slapping on the pavement. An old man wobbled by, leaning on his cane, eyeing them as if unsure whether they were human or zombie. A woman pushing a baby carriage crossed in front of them, staring way into the distance where fire sirens were screaming. A female cop trying to direct traffic, pointing her pistol in the air and getting ignored.

  Casey kept walking, and Maleah kept walking, and now here they were.

  “They smell bad,” Casey offered, as if to downplay the stench of chicken manure. “Like a septic tank and rotten eggs and roadkill skunk rolled into one.”

  “A lot of infection. I studied that in nursing school. A human mouth has more germs than a dog mouth.”

  Casey gazed out across the pasture to the west. The night would be bad. They could run for it, and maybe make it. For one more day.

  “Just supposin’,” Casey said. “What if you had your kids, and you were trapped, and those things were breaking in. Could you stand to see it?”

  Maleah flipped the knife back open as if imagining the scene. “Depends on if I had a gun or not.”

  “Okay, then. Two kids, three bullets. Five zombies. You know how they come in packs.”

  She stood, trembling, lips peeled back in anger, and at first he thought she was going to stab him. She gripped the knife in her slender fingers. “You want me to kill them, don’t you? That’s what you’re asking. Even if I killed three zombies—and I’ve never shot a gun in my life—then there would still be two to eat my children.”

  Casey backed up a step in the face of her sudden frenzy. He’d just meant to get the idea planted, not piss her off. Women. You can never use logic on them. He didn’t know why he had to keep relearning that lesson.

  She went limp, letting the knife fall to the hard wooden floor, where it clattered. Her outburst had upset a hen, which squawked downstairs from some dusty hutch. Casey wondered if zombies could hear things like that.

  “Amber and Stevie,” she said, voice now far away, as if these past few weeks had never happened.

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” he said. He’d already made her kill them in her mind, so he could afford a little mercy.

  In this world, if you wanted to make it, you had to kill off everybody. The living and the dead.

  The chicken had calmed down a little, the frantic clucks giving way to uneasy cooing. Grampy said that’s how you picked out which one to kill, the one that was nervous. “Natural selection,” he called it, a phrase Casey dimly remembered from high school science. If the class had been more about what to do when dead people were walking around trying to eat you, Casey probably would have paid more attention and actually learned something useful.

  What you did, Grampy said, was grab it around the neck. Some people liked to yank, popping the spine, but Grampy said the meat was better if you let the ax do the work, because then you were bleeding it at the same time. Two birds with one stone, he said. The headless chicken would run around for a minute or two, not knowing it was dead, spraying all that crazy out of its system.

  Then you split it open and peeled its skin off like a glove—

  “I killed them,” she said.

  He forgot where he was, so deeply was he back on that Iowa farm, with its endless summer days, sweet corn on the cob, the swimming hole down at the creek, and Susan Vaughn in her pink wet shorts.

  He blinked and stared at her. The dusk had settled, crept through the windows so fast he hadn’t noticed. Maleah’s face was radiant, caught in the last rays of that sagging egg-yolk sun.

  “I saw where it was headed,” she said. “More of them and less of us, every single day. I couldn’t let them become them.”

  She didn’t have to explain. That’s why Casey had run in the first place—not so much to survive, but because he couldn’t stand the notion of familiar forms shambling toward him with that bottomless hunger in their dead eyes. Grampy without his dentures, gums flapping. Susan Vaughn with blood on her shorts. His mother with her bad knees, wriggling forward like a snake. Tyler and his Busch-Lite-hangover shuffle.

  Something had changed outside, and the angle of the light made the trees soft and golden, and shadows grew over the land. Autumn had this way about it, sad and sweet at the same time, like a kiss that had to end.

  There was movement in the trees, but the wind was dead.

  So were the things that walked from the forest.

  “Here they come,” he said, and the words were easy, like he’d rehearsed them in his head a million times.

  He’d wanted to ask how she’d done it. Knife, gun, drowning in the bathtub. He’d seen her stretch marks and knew how crazy women got over the things they’d carried in their bellies.

  Maybe she hadn’t been afraid of them turning at all. She might have been more afraid at turning herself and then putting those babies back in her belly.

  He was going to ask if they should run for it. Say something like, “Next town is only ten miles.” But running in the dark was no good, and the moon had been shrinking each night. Plus she was tired.

  Survival of the fittest, and she wasn’t so fit anymore.

  In the last of the light, he went to the wall of the barn. Rope, chains, a spiky tool that looked like it was used to roll
logs. The ax was the way to go. Take off the head with one chop. Just like with Grampy’s chickens.

  “I should have done it myself,” she said. “But I was too chicken.”

  “I know,” he said, thinking of the bullets in the rifle he’d wasted. The ax felt good in his hands.

  Outside, the forms were moving across the yellow stubble of the pasture, down rows of dying corn, through the brown briars. Walking toward the barn, the only meat for miles.

  Casey wondered if they would eat the chickens, too.

  “Think you can?” she asked.

  Like a kiss that had to end.

  He went to her as dark fell.

  DEAD INK

  By Scott Nicholson

  Richter leaned back in his chair and snuck a peek past his cubicle opening and through the editor’s window.

  No doubt Harbinson was about to send out one of his passive-aggressive emails, resorting to cyberspace for what he could have accomplished with a simple yell out his office door. Richter knew the drill, though. His copy had been sloppy, and no wonder; he was one burned-out cinder of a beat reporter, a crispy critter, cooked in his liver and frontal lobe. Barbecue. Dead meat.

  Sure, he could justify the crappy output. Fifteen years on the news desk, a grand total of 347 county commissioner meetings, the usual land-use disputes, and plenty of ribbon-cuttings featuring the same old speeches by the mayor and the same old posing and strutting by the hogs at the Chamber of Commerce trough. And now a press release from the Sons of Lazarus. The Chief had him scraping the bottom of the barrel, apparently: the religion beat.

  Ping.

  The email icon blinked on his desktop and he punched it up with a grimace. He muttered under his breath in anticipation of the scolding. “Lack of professionalism, lack of spell check, lack of journalistic curiosity…”

  Instead, it was a 10-32. The subject line read “Dead on the scene.”

  Harbinson had the police scanner in his office, and though most newsrooms treated the scanner like a holy artifact meriting its own high pedestal, the editor of the Meadowmont Post loved control far more than he loved instant coverage. In the news game, sometimes seconds were the difference between a scoop and the same old tired follow-ups. Richter opened the email, and in this case Harbinson couldn’t fault his curiosity, because Harbinson usually sent the juicy crime stuff to Marla Eggermeyer, who was young and cute and most likely the object of Harbinson’s frustrated sexual fantasies. To put lemon juice on the cut, Marla was also the best writer on staff.

  But here was Harbinson trusting Richter with a 10-32. The message read, “Police responding to a report of a body at 188 Snowball Avenue. No foul play suspected.”

  That explained it. Most likely it was a suicide, and like most small-town papers, the Post kept such non-news out of the paper. The same was true of most natural deaths, unless the deceased happened to be a prominent citizen or Chamber of Commerce swine. Harbinson had assigned him a story that probably wouldn’t result in a story. Richter would spend two hours circling his own asshole trying to get a statement from the police captain, who would fall back on “No comment until the ME’s report.” In a field that followed the edict “If it bleeds, it leads,” cold cases rarely made it beyond the obituary page.

  Richter gathered his laptop, note pad, and digital camera, stopping by the editor’s office on his way out. “Won’t get much mileage reimbursement out of this one,” he said. “Snowball Avenue is just a block over.”

  “Then you should have a brief filed in less than an hour,” Harbinson said, not looking away from his computer monitor.

  “If anything happens,” Richter said.

  “It’s your job to make something happen.”

  “Right, Chief.” Richter gave a little one-fingered salute to accent the sarcasm, but Harbinson was busy toying with his palm pilot.

  As Richter was leaving, the scanner crackled and spat copspeak. “Another 10-32 at 212 Snowball.”

  A twofer? Maybe it was a joint suicide, or a murder-suicide. Either way, it suggested ink. With any luck, it would be some cult thing and not a domestic dispute. Richter was about to hustle off before Harbinson could shift the assignment to Marla, but the scanner stopped him again.

  “Unit 20 from the 10-32.” Sounded like a cop, from the twang. “There ain’t no body here.”

  The dispatcher cut in with unprofessional honesty. “Well, it didn’t just get up and walk away.”

  “Might have been a hoax.”

  “The number checked. Wait, here’s another one. 215 Snowball. Request back-up?”

  “No, if it’s dead, I can handle it.” Sarcasm wasn’t limited to burned-out journalists.

  “Get on it,” Harbinson said, turning up the scanner’s volume. “This is sounding weird. Want me to send Marla along?”

  As much as Richter would enjoy riding shotgun in Marla’s car, with the heady scent of her perfume suppressing his whiskey stench, he wanted this story. He smelled a press award if it stayed as strange as it suggested.

  He was in the parking lot peeling rubber in his rusty Celica when Marla ran out the door, waving a stack of papers. Richter was tempted to pretend he didn’t see her, but she wasn’t the kind you could avoid looking at. Her taut little breasts bobbed up and down as she approached him, skirt flaring, jiggling on her high heels like a new-born filly.

  Richter rolled down his window, a tactic designed to force her to lean in and talk to him, maybe offering him a quick peek down her blouse.

  “Richter, this fax just came in,” she said, thrusting the loose pages into his lap.

  He lifted the closest one, recognizing the logo of an outfit called PressCom, Inc., obviously a PR firm, judging by the woodenness of the writing. He recited the headline: “The Sons Of Lazarus Sayeth the Dead Shall Rise.”

  “CNN just reported an attack on a morgue in Raleigh.”

  “Who would attack a morgue?”

  “Exactly. They think it was a stunt of this Lazarus bunch.”

  “Man, maybe I should go work for those guys. Looks like they understand the importance of timing.”

  “Richter—”

  “Call me Stan,” he said. He’d been trying for months to get her to drop the journalistic custom of reporters going by their last names on the job, but she either ignored it or missed all his overtures. Besides, she was probably getting boned by the publisher, a 55-year-old vulture who drove a BMW to work while many of his employees took second jobs to make ends meet.

  “That second body is missing, too,” she said, sweeping back her auburn hair. “If the Lazarus cult is active in Meadowmont, this could be a big story. Maybe even national.”

  “Which means we better get it before CNN shows up.” Richter didn’t think it possible that a nut-wing group would pick a backwater like Meadowmont for a publicity stunt, but there was no accounting for family connections. He shuffled through the loose papers until he found contact information.

  “I want this one,” Marla said.

  “Wait a fucking second. You’re listed as the media contact on this press release.”

  She shrugged, creating a fetching ripple across her bosom. “I moonlight. What can I say?”

  “Is this bogus?”

  “Call me and find out.”

  She walked in front of his car and he pumped his accelerator, hoping the sudden roar of the engine would cause her to jump. Instead, his foot slipped from the brake and the car lurched forward, the bumper smacking into her with a meaty thunk. As Richter stabbed at the brake, he hit the gas again and the wheels thumped over her body, the crankcase grinding bone.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Richter said, finally drawing to a stop. He peered out his window and saw one pert ankle twisted at an odd angle, the strapless fuck-me heel several feet away.

  “Marla?” he said, opening the door, debating for a moment whether he should just punch it and put Meadowmont in the rearview mirror, become a fugitive from justice, the lead story in tomorrow’s edition.

&
nbsp; He knelt on the grimy asphalt, dreading what he might see. She didn’t look as bad as he feared she would, but even dead she was a hot little number.

  Hot but cooling fast.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  An accident. They’ll believe it. Hell, I might even get workman’s comp if I fake a nervous breakdown.

  He didn’t think it would be that hard to fake. He touched her leg, just above a nasty scrape that was already oozing a mixture of fat and blood. He let his fingers slide just a little higher along her thigh. Red panties. She was still, no pulse, no sound of raspy breath, and certainly no capacity to tell on him or accuse him of sexual assault.

  Enough. This was getting creepy, even for him. He ran into the building, already planning the statement he would give police, making sure he had time to rehearse for the perfect touch of regret and shock.

  “What is it?” Harbinson said as Richter raced for his cubicle.

  “The phone, quick,” Richter said. The rest of the newsroom, full of people who were used to ignoring distractions, fell silent, as if his vibration had rattled their invisible antennae.

  “Calm down, Richter,” Harbinson said.

  “It’s Marla.”

  “I sent her out on the DOA’s.”

  “No, you don’t get it…she’s the DOA.”

  A scream from one of the graphic artists near the door caused Harbinson to turn away. Marla staggered into the newsroom, grinning with broken teeth, one arm dangling with a gleam of protruding bone. She hobbled forward on one bare foot.

  “Sons of Lazarus,” Richter said.

  Harbinson, as clueless as ever, hurried toward her, too indoctrinated as a gentleman and leader to see that she was dead and still moving.

  The attack on the morgue hadn’t been staged by the cult. No, it had been an inside job.

  Just as this one is shaping up to be.

  Harbinson reached out for his undead reporter, and Richter had just enough time to grab his camera before she hugged the editor and yanked him close.