The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (29 page)

“I’m a lot closer to the dead than I am to the living,” Levitt said, reaching down to massage the shin he’d banged on the wrecking bar. “I’ve got different allegiances. You idiots deserve to be zombie food.” He shook his head. “Why did Cyrus have to get sick
today
of all days? Yesterday I could have just endured your idiot company, but I’m tired of waiting, this is the day I’ve decided to
move
.”

Rufus stood up, not feeling too bad, a little bruised maybe. He lifted the wrecking bar. “If I killed you now, Stevie Ray would believe it was self-defense.”

“So do it then.”

Rufus frowned. He wasn’t about to beat an old man to death with a piece of steel, not now that he wasn’t being actively attacked.

Levitt snorted. “Thought so. I’m taking the truck. Step out of my way and I won’t try to kill you again.”

“Where do you think you’re going to
go
?” Rufus said. “You’ve got that tracking bracelet thingy on your leg!”

“How right you are. So why don’t you just get out of my way, call Stevie Ray, and the two of you can just track me to my lair and bring me to justice. How about that?”

Crap. Did Levitt know the bracelet was useless, or did he just not
care
? “This doesn’t make any sense.” There was a whine in Rufus’s voice, and he hated hearing it, but he hadn’t learned to train the whine out of himself yet. “We’re supposed to go on patrol! I thought you
liked
killing zombies!”

“Killing zombies.” Levitt spat. “It’s like jerking off. If you can’t find someone to sleep with, sure, you jerk off, because it’s better than nothing. But only a fool likes jerking off
better
than sleeping with someone else. I miss the intimacy of killing
real
people. People who can think, and be afraid.”

“I’m not just going to let you go on a killing spree.”

“Then you’ll have to kill me.”

Mr. Levitt stood looking at him for a moment. Rufus pulled out his handgun and pointed it at the old man. “Turn around and put your hands behind your head.”

“No,” Mr. Levitt said. “Wrecking bar, pistol, what do I care? I’m leaving. The only way you can stop me is to kill me. And I’ll do my best to kill you if you try.” He brushed past Rufus, who kept his gun up.
 

“I said stop!”

“Shut up, boy.” Levitt climbed into the truck and shut the door. Rufus squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger. The report of the handgun was enormous and made his ears ring.

He opened his eyes.
 

“Don’t get down to the firing range much, do you?” Mr. Levitt said, looking at the driver’s-side mirror Rufus had shot and pretty well blown apart. “Missing me at this distance, that takes a special kind of incompetence.” Mr. Levitt hurled something out the window at Rufus, making him squawk and dance backward before realizing it was just his coffee thermos. “I can’t drink caffeine anymore,” Levitt said grouchily. “Makes my heart beat too fast and have to pee all the time. Getting old’s a bitch, kid.” He put the truck in gear and drove away. Rufus thought about firing the gun after him, but if he couldn’t hit the old guy from three feet away, how could he hit him in a speeding-off vehicle?

Well, he’d just call Stevie Ray, and they’d track the old guy, and—

The radio was in the truck. With Mr. Levitt. And the phones didn’t work any more. And, heck. He went into Levitt’s garage to check the old guy’s car, but it was out of gas, the tank siphoned dry by Stevie Ray’s orders. Well, it was only a couple miles back to town. He’d run the whole way. At least the weather was nice. Rufus just hoped Mr. Levitt wouldn’t kill anybody before they could track him down.
 

“Darn it,” Stevie Ray said. “I thought the ankle bracelet would keep him from running off. Like a placebo effect.” Stevie Ray stared off into space with a furious expression on his face, tapping his fingers on the top of his neat desk. “Or a deterrent. Whatever. Like those security cameras in stores that aren’t even hooked up to anything, they’re just supposed to make you
think
you’re being watched. I really counted on Cyrus spying on him though.”

Rufus nodded. “Levitt was pretty pissed that I was there and Cyrus wasn’t. You think Cyrus is working with him?”

“I wondered,” Stevie Ray said. “Thought about pulling him off Levitt and getting someone else to watch the old lunatic, but it’s not like I’ve got a lot of manpower here. I sat Cyrus down and had a talk with him after the mayoral election, remember how he spoke up for Levitt? Cyrus told me he was just trying to get Levitt’s trust so he wouldn’t suspect him of reporting back to me, that he was deep undercover, all that. Maybe it was bullshit.” Stevie Ray massaged his temples. “And now the old man says he’s going on a killing spree?”

“That was, uh, more or less the gist, yeah.”

“Okay then. We need to find him. Think you can get your Anti-Zombie club together to go hunting for him?”

“I can, but… they think he’s a hero, Stevie Ray. They look up to him like some kind of badass, even with the rumors about him accidentally killing Ingvar.” He put little air-quotes around “accidentally.”

“Fair enough. Don’t tell them he’s a murderer. Tell them he’s got a touch of dementia, we were trying to keep it quiet, but now he’s having a bad spell and he’s confused and he wandered off and we need to find him for his own protection.” He paused. “Tell them he might get violent.”

“That might work,” Rufus said. “Are you coming?”

Stevie Ray shook his head. “I have to take care of something else. I was over at Julie’s this morning and… never mind, I’ll tell you later.”

“Julie’s, huh?” Rufus had been there the night before. “She, ah, doing well?”

“As well as any of us are,” Stevie Ray said. “I’ll go get her once I’m done with my other errand, and get her on the trail, too. Might have to tell her what Mr. Levitt
really
is. Probably better if more people I trust know it anyway.”

Rufus coughed. “I, uh, think Julie knows about him. I guess… Otto told her.” No harm in blaming the dead for your own indiscretions, he figured.

Stevie Ray actually smiled. “That woman sure can keep a secret.”

“If we catch Mr. Levitt… what are we going to do with him?” Rufus wondered if they could even have a trial, really. A lot of people believed Mr. Levitt was a hero. They hadn’t seen the bodies buried under his house coming back to life—they’d just heard the stories of him putting zombies back
down
.

Stevie Ray shook his head. “Postpone the problem, probably. Lock him up again. We never should have let him out. I’m sure he saved some lives, of course, being our chief zombie hunter… but not enough to offset the lives he’s taken. Or
wants
to take. It’ll be all right. Take this radio—it’s the last one, so don’t lose it or let another murderer run off with it. I thought Harry was crazy for ordering half a dozen of the things with the Homeland Security money, but now I wish we had more. Remember, Levitt can hear anything we say over the air since he got your radio. Just set up a meeting and give people their instructions in person. And happy hunting.”

5. Death in
the Living Room

W
hen Dolph decided he wanted to take a larger hand in the town’s affairs—to continue his penance for his horrible mistake with Gunther Montcrief, and to get himself out of the house sometimes because, committed as he was to fostering some of the displaced orphans from the battle of the bus crash, he hadn’t changed so fundamentally that he’d stopped finding kids basically pretty annoying self-centered creatures. The older ones could watch the younger ones with only occasional course-corrections from him, but being in the cyclone of children—especially children cooped up all winter long, since even playing in the snow out in the yard was worrisome when you thought the little moppets might encounter zombies—was wearing. He needed to get out and do something useful that didn’t involve kids.
 

The problem was, Eileen was in charge of town now, and Eileen didn’t have much use for him. He was too ashamed to go talk to Stevie Ray, because the man had cut him so much slack and done him so many favors—Dolph was still officially free on his own recognizance, awaiting some future court date in some hypothetical future where a court existed—that he didn’t want to impose any further. That left one other member of the newly formed town council with any actual authority and say-so: Julie Olafson.

As Dolph walked out to her farmhouse (it was only a few miles, and the weather was practically mild, and it wasn’t like he had gas to spare), he pondered the stories he’d heard about Julie. Certainly she was a good granddaughter, returning from her life out in the wider world when her grandfather got sick. She was an excellent cook, made an adequate cup of coffee, ran a tight business—Dolph, whose business could at times have been a bit tighter, truth be told, appreciated that quality of competence—and was, by all accounts, a formidable woman. There were other rumors, murmured in the depths of the Backtrack Bar, that were hard to believe: that she was a lady of negotiable virtue, that she was a lesbian, that she liked sleeping with fathers and sons at the same time, that she had assorted “deviant” preferences (without much in the way of elaboration beyond “she likes things like they like out in California and New York City”), that she was a Democrat, and that she’d trained in the CIA as an assassin, though that last came from Cyrus, who also believed she’d traveled in the Orient learning mystical powers, served in the Earth First Battalion, and had personally killed several Al-Qaeda accountants. Since Cyrus got all his information from the people beaming signals to him from inside the hollow spaceship moon, his contributions could be safely ignored, though Julie did have a certain military quality in her bearing, and he’d once heard her offhandedly mention something about “the service.” He didn’t know what service that was. Maybe it would come up when he talked to her. Dolph was just the right age to have avoided being drafted for any wars, and he had the layperson’s fascination with the military.

The Olafson house was a big old white-going-to-gray farmhouse, large enough for a family of ten or more, and once upon a time it had held that many—Julie had aunts and uncles innumerable, pretty much all ancient and/or dead and/or far away by now, though, certainly not up to caring for their even more astonishingly elderly father. Dolph went up the front steps and knocked on the door, honing his pitch, which emphasized heavily his willingness to do just about anything to make the world a better place. He’d voted for Julie in the mayoral election—he might let that slip, too, though it’d be heck to pay if word got back to Eileen, since there was pretty much an unwritten rule that you should vote for someone you’ve slept with if the issue comes up—because he liked what she had to say about making Lake Woebegotten into a green zone, a place of safety and prosperity. She was forward-looking, willing to engage with the world as it was, and she was a good listener—not like Eileen, who seemed to think running the town was no harder than running a house, and hated to take advice from anyone. Dolph would do whatever he could to be on the front lines of building a better future, even if it meant doing nothing but planting fields or chopping trees or catching fish or digging latrines.
 

Julie didn’t come to the door. It was a big house, though, so he knocked harder and waited longer and, after a moment, saw someone moving inside, just a shape shuffling past a curtained window. “Julie?” he called. “That you?” No answer. He touched the doorknob, and it was unlocked—there was still no crime to speak of in Lake Woebegotten, and zombies were too stupid to work doorknobs, locked or not. He pushed open the door and said, “Julie, I don’t mean to intrude, I can come back if it’s a bad time, but—”

The zombie in the hospital gown jerked its head toward him and started shuffling forward. The ancient couch between them stymied the monster somewhat, and it grunted, saliva dripping down its front. Freshly dead, then—still had spit to dribble.
 

Dolph considered just stepping back outside and pulling the door shut and walking off, trusting in the lack of your average zombie’s hand-eye coordination to keep Julie’s brain-craving grandpa from causing him any trouble, but locking up your troubles—especially troubles in the form of zombies—and hoping for someone else to deal with the problem was something the
old
Dolph would have done, the Dolph who’d enjoyed afternoon delights with a married woman and reveled in the feeling of, well,
naughtiness
it gave him; the Dolph who’d seriously considered Eileen’s suggestion that he become some sort of grocery-hoarding kingpin; the Dolph who’d pretty much died forever the same afternoon that Gunther Montcrief did. The new Dolph tried to face his responsibilities head-on. Julie might be in the house, in danger, or she might come home to find danger there, or the zombie might blunder out a window and stroll in just the right direction and end up in town biting some kid. So he had to do something. Well, all right then.

Dolph stepped into the living room and shut the door behind him. “Mr. Olafson, I’m sorry it’s come to this. You made the best patty melt I ever had in my life, and you were never stingy with the butter.”

Mr. Olafson didn’t say anything, just kept trying to lurch through the couch toward him. Dolph looked around the room for something he could use as a weapon, and his eye fell upon one of the traditional implements favored by those who chose to keep and bear arms on the spur of the moment, as it were: a fireplace poker. He stepped carefully around the ottoman and the pile of old magazines and avoided the rucked-up hump of a throw rug, careful not to lose his balance or fall, because zombies could move quick when they thought there was easy meat on the floor. Dolph picked up the fire poker, a comforting iron weight, the end blackened from years of, well, poking at fires, as the name of the tool implied. The end would turn red when he swung it, he knew. Fresh zombies had fresh blood. Dolph didn’t much like thinking about that.
 

Poor Mr. Olafson was totally stymied by the couch, too. He was trying to chew his way through the back of the couch now, unable to understand that he should walk around it, and apparently too uncoordinated to go over it. He’d been sick for a long time, and his body looked like a collection of matchsticks jumbled up in a pillowcase, and there were liver spots on his mostly-bald head, and wisps of white hair sticking up on the fringes like he’d just gotten out of bed. Which he had, pretty much, for the last time. Dolph walked over to him, lifting the poker, and sighed. He was supposed to crack this old man across the face, and then separate his head from his body? Maybe he could drag the old fella out back, look for an axe—the woodpile was back there, surely there was an axe somewhere nearby—and do it halfway cleanly. There’d have to be some initial violence to bring him down, though. One zombie wasn’t really all that dangerous, Dolph realized, not if you were ready for it, and knew what you were up against, and paid attention. In fact, it was… kind of pitiful.