Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (9 page)

Jack was stil fresh.

She sat, poised, head cocked to one side, knitting in her hands. A little pink bootee. She had already made a blue set. Al of a sudden it seemed she could hear so
much
. The wind. The faint thunder of surf on Cricket’s Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hal way.

It was Jack. She knew it.

“Jack?” she said, and the window burst inward and what came in was not real y Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it.

His compass was stil around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.

The wind blew the curtains out in a cloud as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.

He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was hungry… but this time chicken noodle soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the can.

Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those dark barnacle-crusted holes, and she realized she was looking at whatever remained of Jack’s brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up and came toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms. His hands stretched. His teeth champed mechanical y up and down. Maddie saw he was wearing the remains of the black-and-red-checked shirt she had bought him at L.L. Bean’s last Christmas. It had cost the earth, but he had said again and again how warm it was, and look how wel it had lasted, even under water al this time, even—

The cold cobwebs of bone which were al that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the baby kicked in her stomach—for the first time—and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing’s eye.

Making horrid, thick, draggling noises that sounded like the suck of a swil pump, he staggered backward, clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootee swung in front of the cavity where his nose had been. She watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootee, leaving a trail of slime behind it.

Jack fel over the end table she’d gotten at a yard sale just after they had been married—she hadn’t been able to make her mind up about it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack final y said either she was going to buy it for their living room or he was going to give the biddy running the sale twice what she was asking for the goddam thing and then bust it up into firewood with—

—with the—

He struck the floor and there was a brittle, cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in two. The right hand tore the knitting needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eye socket and tossed it aside. His top half crawled toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together.

She thought he was trying to grin, and then the baby kicked again and she thought:
You buy it,
Maddie, for Christ’s sake! I’m tired! Want to go home and get m’dinner! You want it, buy it! If
you don’t, I’l give that old bat twice what she wants and bust it up for firewood with my
—

Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; pol uted teeth poised to bite. To kil her and kil the baby.

She tore loose, leaving him with only her slipper, which he tried to chew and then spat out.

When she came back from the entry, he was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen—at least the top half of him was—with the compass dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of her, and there seemed to be some idiot question in those black eye sockets before she brought the ax whistling down, cleaving his skul as he had threatened to cleave the end table.

His head fel in two pieces, brains dribbling across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that squirmed with slugs and gelatinous sea worms, brains that smel ed like a woodchuck exploded with gassy decay in a high-summer meadow.

Stil his hands clashed and clittered on the kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles.

She chopped… she chopped… she chopped.

At last there was no more movement.

A sharp pain rippled across her midsection and for a moment she was gripped by terrible panic:
Is it a miscarriage? Am I going to have a miscarriage?
But the pain left… and the baby kicked again, more strongly than before.

She went back into the living room, carrying an ax that now smel ed like tripe.

His legs had somehow managed to stand.

“Jack, I loved you so much,” she said, and brought the ax down in a whistling arc that split him at the pelvis, sliced the carpet, and drove deep into the solid oak floor beneath.

The legs, separated, trembled wildly… and then lay stil .

She carried him down to the cel ar piece by piece, wearing her oven gloves and wrapping each piece with the insulating blankets Jack had kept in the shed and which she had never thrown away—he and the crew threw them over the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn’t freeze.

Once a severed hand tried to close over her wrist… then loosened.

That was al .

There was an unused cistern, pol uted, which Jack had been meaning to fil in. Maddie Pace slid the heavy concrete cover aside so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of him down, listening to the splashes, then worked the heavy cover back in place.

“Rest in peace,” she whispered, and an interior voice whispered back that her husband was resting in
pieces
, and then she began to cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks, and she pul ed at her hair and tore at her breasts until they were bloody, and she thought, I am insane, this is what it’s like to be in—

But before the thought could be completed, she had fal en down in a faint that became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt al right.

She would never tel , though.

Never.

She understood, of course, that Dave knew nothing of this, and Dave would say nothing at al if she pressed. She kept her ears open, and she knew what he meant, and what they had apparently done. The dead folks and the… the parts of dead folks that wouldn’t… wouldn’t be stil … had been chain-sawed like her father had chain-sawed the hardwood on Pop Cook’s two acres after he had gotten the deed registered, and then those parts—some
stil
squirming, hands with no arms attached to them clutching mindlessly, feet divorced from their legs digging at the bul et-chewed earth of the graveyard as if trying to run away—had been doused with diesel fuel and set afire. She had seen the pyre from the house.

Later, Jenny’s one fire truck had turned its hose on the dying blaze, although there wasn’t much chance of the fire spreading, with a brisk easterly blowing the sparks off Jenny’s seaward edge.

When there was nothing left but a stinking, tal owy lump (and stil there were occasional bulges in this mass, like twitches in a tired muscle), Matt Arsenault fired up his old D-9 Caterpil ar—

above the nicked steel blade and under his faded pil owtick engineer’s cap, Matt’s face had been as white as cottage cheese—and plowed the whole hel acious mess under.

The moon was coming up when Frank took Bob Daggett, Dave Eamons, and Cal Partridge aside.

“I’m havin a goddam heart attack,” he said.

“Now, Uncle Frank—”

“Never mind Uncle Frank this ‘n’ that,” the old man said. “I ain’t got time, and I ain’t wrong. Seen half my friends go the same way. Beats hel out of getting whacked with the cancer-stick.

Quicker. But when I go down, I intend to
stay
down. Cal, stick that rifle of yours in my left ear.

Muzzle’s gonna get some wax on it, but it won’t be there after you pul the trigger. Dave, when I raise my left arm, you sock your thirty-thirty into my armpit, and see that you do it a right smart.

And Bobby, you put yours right over my heart. I’m gonna say the Lawd’s Prayer, and when I hit amen, you three fel ows are gonna pul your triggers.”

“Uncle Frank—” Bob managed. He was reeling on his heels.

“I told you not to start in on that,” Frank said. “And don’t you
dare
faint on me, you friggin’

pantywaist. If I’m goin’ down, I mean to
stay
down. Now get over here.”

Bob did.

Frank looked around at the three men, their faces as white as Matt Arsenault’s had been when he drove the dozer over men and women he had known since he was a kid in short pants and Buster Browns.

“I ain’t got long,” Frank said, “and I only got enough jizzum left to get m’arm up once, so don’t you fuck up on me. And remember, I’d ‘a’ done the same for any of you. If that don’t help, ask y’selves if
you’d
want to end up like those we just took care of.”

“Go on,” Bob said hoarsely. “I love you, Uncle Frank.”

“You ain’t the man your father was, Bobby Daggett, but I love you, too,” Frank said calmly, and then, with a cry of pain, he threw his left hand up over his head like a guy in New York who has to have a cab in a rip of a hurry, and started in: “Our father who art in heaven—
Christ
, that hurts!—hal ow’d be Thy name—oh, son of a
gun
, I—Thy kingdom come, Thy wil be done, on earth as it… as it…”

Frank’s upraised left arm was wavering wildly now. Dave Eamons, with his rifle socked into the old geezer’s armpit, watched it as careful y as a logger would watch a big tree that looked like it meant to fal the wrong way. Every man on the island was watching now. Big beads of sweat had formed on the old man’s pal id face. His lips had pul ed back from the even, yel owish white of his Roebuckers, and Dave had been able to smel the Polident on his breath.

“…as it is in heaven!” the old man jerked out. “Lead us not into temptation butdeliverusfromevilohshitonitforeverandeverAMEN!”

Al three of them fired, and both Cal Partridge and Bob Daggett fainted, but Frank never did try to get up and walk.

Frank Daggett intended to
stay
dead, and that was just what he did.

Once Dave started that story he had to go on with it, and so he cursed himself for ever starting.

He’d been right the first time; it was no story for a pregnant woman.

But Maddie had kissed him and told him she thought he had done wonderful y, and Dave went out, feeling a little dazed, as if he had just been kissed on the cheek by a woman he had never met before.

As, in a way, he had.

She watched him go down the path to the dirt track that was one of Jenny’s two roads and turn left. He was weaving a little in the moonlight, weaving with tiredness, she thought, but reeling with shock, as wel . Her heart went out to him… to al of them. She had wanted to tel Dave she loved him and kiss him squarely on the mouth instead of just skimming his cheek with her lips, but he might have taken the wrong meaning from something like that, even though he was bone-weary and she was almost five months pregnant.

But she
did
love him, loved
al
of them, because they had gone through a hel she could only imagine dimly, and by going through that hel they had made the island safe for her.

Safe for her baby.

“It wil be a home delivery,” she said softly as Dave went out of sight behind the dark hulk of the Pulsifers’ satel ite dish. Her eyes rose to the moon. “It wil be a home delivery… and it wil be fine.”

5. Wet Work By Philip Nutman

Corvino, pul ing the trigger…

…
and the film loop turns again. Twenty years the same image; slight variations, but ultimately
the same: blood, death
.

The bul et takes the Negro straight between the eyes, exiting the back of the cranium, spraying bone, blood, cerebral matter over the wal .

A professional assassin, his aim is true. A dead shot.

The body of the janitor lies on the floor, legs splayed open in a V pattern. What is left of the head lol s to the left. Above the corpse, a crimson skid mark.

Corvino, exhaling.

So easy. Squeeze a trigger, snuff out a candle. Another life taken
.

He steps between the disorganized desks that clutter the classroom, proceeding to check the supply cupboard.

Empty.

From down the hal way the sound of breaking glass; three rapid-fire shots.

The brain, Harris. The brain
.

Silence hangs heavy in the stil atmosphere.

(…the white room in the apartment block overlooking the Potomac. Simple, Spartan, befitting an
assassin. The two abstract paintings in the style of Pol ack. One composed of blue and orange
slashes, paradoxical y both dynamic and tranquil. The other a red arc on white, like a seppuku
mat…
)

Harris’s aim is deteriorating under the stress of the past week.

(…his room, his retreat from the insanity of the world’s war zones, where only his eye for
accuracy had kept him alive… Vietnam… the Middle East… Nicaragua…
) They cal him One-Shot, or Mr. Trigger. Dominic Corvino, the most reliable wet-work operative the Department owns. Guns are his friends. In the art of kil ing he is a master craftsman.

Now the stakes have changed.

(…his sanctuary defiled… the shadowy figure suddenly appearing in the doorway… the hiss of a suppressor… and a white-hot poker of pain piercing his chest…) Now it is al down to basics.

He sits on a desk, pul ing a Camel from his chest pocket, lights it, and exhales. The stench of death an old companion, the taste of a cigarette rare pleasure. Smoke catches at the back of his throat. Too dry, the tobacco stale. Corvino grinds it out with the heel of his right boot as he stands, checking the clip in his .45 automatic.

In life only one thing is certain: change.

The whole apple cart has fal en; not to the left or the right but straight down on its axle, spil ing the load in every direction so there is no escape from the fal out.

Strange times in Casablanca
.

Al the same: the streets and suburbs of the world’s cities awash with blood. Friend against friend, brother against sister.