The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (30 page)

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Olafson,” he said again, and closed his eyes, and swung the poker.

The sound was so loud that at first Dolph thought he had somehow hit the old man’s head hard enough to make it explode, and indeed when he opened his eyes, half the gentleman’s head was gone, one eye peering out from under a wispy-hair-framed liver spot, the other eye nowhere to be found. The funny thing was, Dolph hadn’t even felt the impact of the poker hitting flesh, and shouldn’t his arm be vibrating a little, and why wasn’t there anything red—or for that matter gray—on the end of the poker anyway?

“It’s all right, Dolph,” Julie said from behind him. “He’s… well… he was already dead. But he’s dead again.”

Dolph turned, and Julie was putting away a rather large pistol into a holster on her hip. The thing was, she wasn’t wearing much except the pistol, and what appeared to be some strategically-placed bits of leather and chrome. Dolph’s own fantasies about female attire leaned more toward women wearing stockings and high heels and things frilly and red, but there was certainly something arresting about her get-up. “Ah,” he said, and then fell back on a dependable conversational standby: “That’s a pretty nice-looking gun.”

“It’s an IMI Jericho 941,” Julie said, patting the holster, which was also black leather, and matched the rest of her outfit. “Sometimes called a Baby Eagle. Forty-five caliber double action/single action semi-automatic. One of the models favored by the Israeli Army.”

“Is that where you served?” Dolph asked, still just trying to keep a lid of normalcy on what was a rather surreal situation: holding a fireplace poker and standing over the dead grandfather of a woman in a fetish outfit.

Julie walked around the couch and looked down at her grandfather and sighed. “He was a good man. I’d hoped to be with him at the end, to make this part easier, but I was… busy.” She glanced at Dolph. “Your question. Yes. I was a volunteer in the Israeli army for a few years.”

Dolph said, “Oh.”

“I’m Jewish, of course,” she said. “Not very observant, but in college I took an interest in Israel, and also wanted combat training—self-defense was very important to me, for reasons I won’t bore you with—and it’s harder for a woman to get substantive combat training in the American services, so…” She shrugged. “The Israeli army has a program for foreign Jewish volunteers.”

“I thought Mr. Olafson was Lutheran. Saw him at church a lot.”

“He was Lutheran, originally. And he liked the sense of community at church, I think. But grandmother was Jewish, and grandfather converted when they were first married. Not that it mattered much for my mother and aunts and uncles and cousins and me, growing up—grandfather didn’t want to give up any of the traditions he’d grown up with, so we just had Passover
and
Easter. Lefse and latkes, matzoh ball soup and beer cheese soup. You never noticed, he decorated the house with blue lights during the holidays, for Hanukkah?”

“I just thought he liked blue lights.”

“That too,” Julie said. “Well. He may not have been the most observant Jew, but I’d like to cover his body now, and light candles. You’ll stay with him while I change clothes? And help me wash his body, and bury him afterward?”

“We’re supposed to burn…” he said, but stopped at Julie’s ferocious glare. “Whatever you want.”

“My grandmother is buried in the family plot behind the house. She was laid to rest in just a shroud, as she wished. My grandfather wished the same. I hope the earth is soft enough to dig, now.” She knelt, closed her grandfather’s eyes—no magical passing-the-palm-over-the-eyes to close them trick here like they did in the movies, she had to actually touch the lid and pull it down and press it firmly with her thumb to make sure it stayed closed—and then took a woven afghan from the couch and draped it over his body, covering up almost everything but a few bone and brain fragments that had scattered farther away. “While we’re digging, you can tell me what you were doing in my living room, hmm?”

6. Minnesota Pastoral

I
t occurred to Pastor Inkfist that, if Julie really thought there was an intruder or a zombie or something upstairs, it probably wasn’t the most considerate thing for her to leave him tied up like this in the basement. “Julie?” he called, but she didn’t answer, which didn’t do his heart good. Daniel wasn’t entirely naked. Julie had an array of interesting undergarments designed for the discerning male, and he was wearing one of the most uncomfortable of the bunch now, but while the discomfort was rather… enjoyable… under her attentions, at the moment it just chafed. His wrists here tied in front of him with soft red ropes, his ankles similarly restricted, and he figured he was gong to make a nice meal for a zombie.

After the council meeting broke up and the others left, Daniel lingered, and hemmed and hawed and finally asked if Julie had a little time this afternoon to fit him into her schedule, as it was.
 

“What do you propose to barter?” she’d asked, cool as you please.
 

“Ah, my wife, she had a lot of beauty products, you know, bath salts and shampoos and make-up and… um… luxury items, you know, like you can’t get anymore…” His voice just trailed off as she slowly shook her head. “I guess maybe that’s not your sort of thing,” he said weakly.

“You might say that,” she agreed. “Anything else?”

Daniel hadn’t come here with much of anything in mind for trade besides the contents of his wife’s medicine cabinet—he’d already given Julie some of his hand tools, a bunch of books, and all his spare pillows and blankets—but he thought hard and said, “Antibiotics! I’ve got, oh, half a bottle of amoxicillin. Doc Holliday prescribed them over the phone last year when my wife called thinking she had an ear infection, but it turned out she just had swimmer’s ear, and she didn’t end up using most of them. Are those any good to you?”

“Less than a year old? All right. You’ll bring it next time. Are you ready now?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

He’d closed his eyes and answered the way she liked to be answered, and she’d led him to the basement, and put on the outfit he liked, and put
him
in the outfit he liked, and started in with the implements, and then she’d heard a noise upstairs and now here he was in a not very tenuous position.
 

When he heard the gunshot up above, he closed his eyes and started to pray.
Oh Lord,
he thought,
if it is your will that I die here this day for my weakness, I will understand, but if you let me live another day, I will repent for my—

Then he remembered Julie’s original safety lecture. “What if I have a heart attack?” she’d said, as if there were anyone in town in better physical condition than she was. “While you’re… compromised? That’s why I’ll always leave these where you can reach them.”
 

He looked around, and there were the red-handled paramedic shears, strong enough to cut through leather, vinyl, canvas, and even light metals. Reaching them was easy—they were on the table with some other things that needed to be within reach—but maneuvering them with his wrists bound together was harder. He managed to cut through the ropes tying his ankles, but couldn’t twist his hands sufficiently to cut the ropes around his wrists. Daniel ended up propping the shears on the table, holding them in place with some heavier items, slipping the ropes between the blades, and pushing the handle down with his chin. Awkward—especially the way these particular undergarments rode up—but it got the job done, and the ropes parted enough for him to get unwrapped and untangled.
 

He hopped around a bit getting out of the underwear, then put on his own clothes quickly, looking around for a weapon. If he wanted to
lash
a zombie, that was pretty well-covered, but he didn’t think a cat-o’-nine-tails would make much of an impression. Likewise the cattle prod—which Julie said wasn’t a
real
cattle prod, but one with a weaker current meant for use on people, no, that he’d wanted to dabble in that, especially. He didn’t think zombies would respond much to electricity. At best, he’d make their skin burn, which wouldn’t smell too nice.
 

He hunted around until he found a telescoping, locking metal rod, that happened to have a couple of leather cuffs dangling from the ends—some kind of bar for holding hands or feet apart, apparently. It had a nice heft to it, though, and would work as a club until he could find something better. Daniel crept up the stairs slowly, listening… and heard voices talking. Zombies didn’t talk. Ergo, there weren’t zombies up there. At least, not anymore. But Julie didn’t talk to
herself
—at least, he doubted it, she was pretty self-contained—which meant someone
else
was up there.
 

Daniel put down the spreader bar, peeked into the kitchen—all clear—and hurried to the back door, out, and around the side. There were no unfamiliar vehicles in the driveway to give away the identity of the visitor. Probably not Edsel—he didn’t talk quietly, and his voice carried—but it could have been anyone else. What if it was Eileen? The
mayor
? If
she
found out what he and Julie got up to, what he
paid
Julie to do, if she told…

He considered just running to his car and driving away, but that wasn’t very Christian. What if Julie had a problem? Daniel straightened, tried to smooth down his hair by touch alone, went up the steps to the front door, and knocked, not too hard.

Julie answered the door, wearing a t-shirt and jeans now, and gave him just the barest hint of a smile. “Pastor. What can I do for you?”

“Just, ah, going around, checking on… everyone. How are you?”

“Come in,” she said, standing aside. Daniel looked past her and saw Dolph standing by the couch, looking sort of shamefaced, and he thought,
another customer
?
 

“My grandfather passed away,” Julie said. “I sent him to his second death. We were going to bury him.”

“But we’re supposed to burn—of course. Yes. He wanted to be buried? Next to his wife? Certainly. Perhaps you’d like me to say a few words?”

Another ghost of a smile. “Do you know the Kaddish, Pastor?”

Daniel had to admit that he did not, but he was willing to learn, because all paths to God were deserving of respect, even if he privately thought some of them were pretty darned odd.

After about forty minutes of chipping away at the earth—which was pretty pliable for the first five inches and then basically turned to stone—even Julie had to sigh and shake her head and admit they couldn’t do the job with shovels. “Grandfather had an electrical post-hole digger,” she said, and Daniel had a vision of trying to dig a six-foot-deep, six-foot-long, three-foot-wide hole one post-hole worth of dirt at a time. It was not a pleasant vision. Not as harrowing as the vision that assailed St. John the Divine, certainly, not an
apocalyptic
vision, but a vision of unbearable tedium.

“I, ah, know where we can get a backhoe,” Dolph said, standing over by the shrouded corpse of Julie’s grandfather.

“Today?” Julie said. “Right now? Jewish rites call for interment as soon as possible.”

“Don’t see why not,” Dolph said. “It’s at the construction site, where they tore down the old elementary school because after they pulled out the asbestos and lead and assorted toxins and carcinogens there was barely enough material left to even really consider it a building. They were supposed to be putting a rest home there, apparently that was the booming business, geriatric care, but, well, things have understandably stalled. The crew’s from over in St. Elmer, and they didn’t come back once the zombies started rising and such. But their backhoe is still there. Probably still gassed up. If the Reverend can drive me over, I can get it.”

“Do either of you know how to drive a backhoe loader?” Julie asked.

“I drove a forklift a few times,” Dolph said.
 

“A backhoe is not a forklift,” Julie said, shaking her head. “Pastor?”

Daniel could barely drive a stick shift. “I don’t think so…”

“Then you stay with grandfather,” Julie said. “Dolph and I will take your car, and I will drive the backhoe here, and dig the grave.”

“Ah, I could go with you,” Daniel said, coughing into his fist. He’d spent his fair share of time with the dead, of course, any minister had, but he’d had his fill of corpses. Besides, he wanted to spend time with Julie, to talk to her, to talk
business
with her, regarding their particular form of business, which was of course a sin, but God couldn’t be too upset about it, after all he’d let Daniel out of the basement alive and hadn’t sent him into some sort of devoured-by-zombies situation, and he was a forgiving God, anyway, so why not give him a few things to forgive? It was expected.
 

“No, the body can’t be left alone,” Julie said. “Someone must attend it at all times. You are a man of God, after all—it should be you.”

Before Daniel could protest further, Julie was holding out her hands for his keys. Daniel wanted to ask why they had to take
his
car, why they couldn’t just take Julie’s truck, but he knew it was because Julie loved her truck, and if she was going to be driving the backhoe, that meant Dolph would have to drive
her
truck, and she didn’t let anyone else drive her truck. If he pressed, Julie would just explain that, completely unselfconsciously and unapologetically, and she might take it out on him later by, well,
not
taking it out on him, and he didn’t want that. So Daniel handed over the keys and started explaining how sometimes the windshield wipers stick on the intermittent position and how the brakes are a little touchy, and Dolph started telling him about his own truck and how it pulls to the right, always has, you have to put a subtle leftward pressure on the wheel just to keep it straight, which reminded Daniel about his first car, a Pinto, and how the windows got frozen in the rolled-down position one winter and Daniel had to put trash bags over them when he parked to keep the snow out and had to wear earmuffs and a scarf all the time when driving, and then Julie went from tapping her foot and clearing her throat to actually pulling Dolph away in the direction of Daniel’s car.