Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (50 page)

Everything above the Adam’s apple rained down to the west as goulash and flip chips.

Wormboy heard the shot but did not witness it. Right now his overriding concern was impact.

A geek turned and saw him, raising its arms as if in supplication, or a pathetic attempt to catch the UFO that isolated it in the center of a house-sized, ever-growing shadow.

Eugene Roach’s overpriced monument stone veered into the moat. The mushy zombie watched it right up until the second it hit. The fal out was so thick you could eat it with a fondue fork.

Wormboy clamped shut his eyes, screamed, and bel ied in headfirst. Bones snapped when he landed. Only the yel ows of the geek’s eyes were visible at the end. It liquefied with a
poosh
and became a wet stain at the bottom of the furrow dug by Wormboy’s touchdown.

Al heads turned.

His brain was like a board room choked with yel ing stockbrokers. The first report informed him that aerial acrobatics did not agree with his physique. The second enumerated fractures, shutdown, concussion, an eardrum that had popped with the explosive decompression of a pimento being vacuumed from an olive, the equitable distribution of slag-hot agony to every outback and tributary of his vast body… and the dead taste of moist dirt.

The third was a surprise news flash: He had not been gourmandized down to nerve peels and half a dozen red corpuscles. Yet.

He filed a formal request to rol back his eyelids and it took about an hour to go through channels.

He saw stars, but they were in the postmidnight sky above him. He lay on his back, legs straight, arms out in a plane shape. What a funny.

Eight pairs of reanimated dead eyes appraised him.

They’ve got me, dead bang, he thought. For more than a year they’ve whiffed me and gotten smithereened… and now I’ve jol y wel been served up to them airfreight, gunless, laid out flat on my flab. Maybe they waited just so I could savor the sensual cornucopia of being devoured alive firsthand. Dr. Moreau time, kids. Time for Uncle Wormy to check out for keeps.

He tried to wiggle numb fingers at them. “Yo, dudes.” It was al he could think of to do.

The zombies surrounding him—three up, three down, one at his feet, and one at his head—

rustled as though stirred by a soft breeze. They communed.

The skul of the Right Reverend Jerry had been perched on his chest. He could barely see it up there. The blood-dyed and tooth-scored fragments had been leaned together into a fragile sort of card ossuary. He could see that his bul et had gone in through Jerry’s left eyebrow. Good shot.

His insides convulsed and he issued a weak cough. The skul clattered apart like an inadequately glued clay pot.

More commotion, among the zombies.

The Right Reverend Jerry had been gnawed down to a jackstraw clutter of bones; the bones had been cracked, their marrow greedily drained. Al through the feast, there he had been, mere feet distant, representing bigger portions for everybody. He had gone unmolested for hours. Instead of tucking in, they had gathered round and waited for him to wake up. They had flipped him over, touched him without biting. They had pieced together Jerry’s headbone and seen it blown apart by a cough. They had Witnessed, al right.

He considered the soda-cracker fragments of skul and felt the same rush of revelation he had experienced with Duke Mal ett’s eyebal . So fitting, now, to savor that crunchy stone-ground goodness.

The eyes that sought him did not judge. They did not see a grotesquely obese man who snarfed up worms and eyebal s and never bathed. The watchers did not snicker in a Duke Mal ett drawl, or reject him, or find him lacking in any social particular. They had waited for him to revive.

Patiently, on purpose, they had waited. For him.

They had never sought to eat of his lard or drink of his cholesterol. The Right Reverend Jerry had taught them that there were hungers other than physical.

One of his legs felt busted, but with effort he found himself capable of hiking up onto both elbows. The zombies shuffled dutiful y back to make room for him to rise, and when he did not, they helped him, wrestling him erect like dogfaces hoisting the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. He realized that if he cared to order them to march into one of Val ey View’s crematory ovens according to height, they’d gladly comply.

He had, at last, gained the devoted approval of a peer group.

And any second now, some asshole would try to whore up this resurrection for posterity in a big, bad, black book… and get it al wrong. He decided that anybody who tried would have a quick but meaningful confab with Zombo.

I win again
. He had thought this many times before, in reference to those he once dubbed geeks. Warmth flooded him.
He
was not a geek… therefore
they
were not.

What he final y spake unto them was something like: “Aww… shit, you guys, I guess we oughta go hustle up some potluck, huh?”

He began by passing out the puzzle pieces of the Right Reverend Jerry’s skul . As one, they al took and ate without breathing.

And they saw that it was good.

Eat Me

BY ROBERT R. McCAMMON

A question gnawed, day and night, at Jim Crisp. He pondered it as he walked the streets, while a dark rain fel and rats chattered at his feet; he mul ed over it as he sat in his apartment, staring at the static on the television screen hour after hour. The question haunted him as he sat in the cemetery on Fourteenth Street, surrounded by empty graves. And this burning question was: when did love die?

Thinking took effort. It made his brain hurt, but it seemed to Jim that thinking was his last link with life. He used to be an accountant, a long time ago. He’d worked with a firm downtown for over twenty years, had never been married, hadn’t dated much either. Numbers, logic, the rituals of mathematics had been the center of his life; now logic itself had gone insane, and no one kept records anymore. He had a terrible sensation of not belonging in this world, of being suspended in a nightmare that would stretch to the boundaries of eternity. He had no need for sleep any longer; something inside him had burst a while back, and he’d lost the ten or twelve pounds of fat that had gathered around his middle over the years. His body was lean now, so light sometimes a strong wind knocked him off his feet. The smel came and went, but Jim had a caseload of English Leather in his apartment and he took baths in the stuff.

The open maw of time frightened him. Days without number lay ahead. What was there to do, when there was nothing to be done? No one cal ed the rol , no one punched the time-clock, no one set the deadlines. This warped freedom gave a sense of power to others; to Jim it was the most confining of prisons, because al the symbols of order—stoplights, calendars, clocks—were stil there, stil working, yet they had no purpose or sense, and they reminded him too much of what had been before.

As he walked, aimlessly, through the city’s streets he saw others moving past, some as peaceful as sleepwalkers, some raging in the grip of private tortures. Jim came to a corner and stopped, instinctively obeying the DON’T WALK sign; a high squealing noise caught his attention, and he looked to his left.

Rats were scurrying wildly over one of the lowest forms of humanity, a half-decayed corpse that had recently awakened and pul ed itself from the grave. The thing crawled on the wet pavement, struggling on one thin arm and two sticklike legs. The rats were chewing it to pieces, and as the thing reached Jim, its skeletal face lifted and the single dim coal of an eye found him.

From its mouth came a rattling noise, stifled when several rats squeezed themselves between the gray lips in search of softer flesh. Jim hurried on, not waiting for the light to change. He thought the thing had said
Whhhyyy?
and for that question he had no answer.

He felt shame in the coil of his entrails. When did love die? Had it perished at the same time as this living death of human flesh had begun, or had it already died and decayed long before? He went on, through the somber streets where the buildings brooded like tombstones, and he felt crushed beneath the weight of loneliness.

Jim remembered beauty: a yel ow flower, the scent of a woman’s perfume, the warm sheen of a woman’s hair. Remembering was another bar in the prison of bones; the power of memory taunted him unmerciful y. He remembered walking on his lunch hour, sighting a pretty girl and fol owing her for a block or two, enraptured by fantasies. He had always been searching for love, for someone to be joined with, and had never realized it so vital y before now, when the gray city was ful of rats and the restless dead.

Someone with a cavity where its face had been stumbled past, arms waving blindly. What once had been a child ran by him, and left the scent of rot in its wake. Jim lowered his head, and when a gust of hot wind hit him he lost his balance and would have slammed into a concrete wal if he hadn’t grabbed hold of a bolted-down mailbox. He kept going, deeper into the city, on pavement he’d never walked when he was alive.

At the intersection of two unfamiliar streets he thought he heard music: the crackle of a guitar, the low grunting of a drumbeat. He turned against the wind, fighting the gusts that threatened to hurl him into the air, and fol owed the sound. Two blocks ahead a strobe light flashed in a cavernous entrance. A sign that read THE COURTYARD had been broken out, and across the front of the building was scrawled BONEYARD in black spray paint. Figures moved within the entrance: dancers, gyrating in the flash of the strobes.

The thunder of the music repulsed him—the soft grace of Brahms remained his lul aby, not the raucous crudity of Grave Rock—but the activity, the movement, the heat of energy drew him closer. He scratched a maddening itch on the dry flesh at the back of his neck and stood on the threshold while the music and the glare blew around him. The Courtyard, he thought, glancing at the old sign. It was the name of a place that might once have served white wine and polite jazz music—a singles bar, maybe, where the lonely went to meet the lonely. The Boneyard it was now, al right: a realm of dancing skeletons. This was not his kind of place, but stil … the noise, lights, and gyrations spoke of another kind of loneliness. It was a singles bar for the living dead, and it beckoned him in.

Jim crossed the threshold, and with one desiccated hand he smoothed down his remaining bits of black hair.

And now he knew what hel must be like: a smoky, rot-smel ing pandemonium. Some of the things writhing on the dance floor were missing arms and legs, and one thin figure in the midst of a whirl lost its hand; the withered flesh skidded across the linoleum, was crushed underfoot as its owner scrabbled after it, and then its owner was likewise pummeled down into a twitching mass. On the bandstand were two guitar players, a drummer, and a legless thing hammering at an electric organ. Jim avoided the dance floor, moving through the crowd toward the blue-neon bar. The drum’s pounding offended him, in an obscene way; it reminded him too much of how his heartbeat used to feel before it clenched and ceased.

This was a place his mother—God rest her soul—would have warned him to avoid. He had never been one for nightlife, and looking into the decayed faces of some of these people was a preview of torments that lay ahead— but he didn’t want to leave. The drumbeat was so loud it destroyed al thinking, and for a while he could pretend it was indeed his own heart returned to scarlet life; and that, he realized, was why the Boneyard was ful from wal to wal . This was a mockery of life, yes, but it was the best to be had.

The bar’s neon lit up the rotting faces like blue-shadowed Hal oween masks. One of them, down to shreds of flesh clinging to yel ow bone, shouted something unintel igible and drank from a bottle of beer; the liquid streamed through the fissure in his throat and down over his violet shirt and gold chains. Flies swarmed around the bar, drawn to the reek, and Jim watched as the customers pressed forward. They reached into their pockets and changepurses and offered freshly-kil ed rats, roaches, spiders, and centipedes to the bartender, who placed the objects in a large glass jar that had replaced the cash register. Such was the currency of the Dead World, and a particularly juicy rat bought two bottles of Mil er Lite. Other people were laughing and hol ering—gasping, brittle sounds that held no semblance of humanity. A fight broke out near the dance floor, and a twisted arm thunked to the linoleum to the delighted roar of the onlookers.

“I know you!” A woman’s face thrust forward into Jim’s. She had tatters of gray hair, and she wore heavy makeup over sunken cheeks, her forehead swol en and cracked by some horrible inner pressure. Her glittery dress danced with light, but smel ed of gravedirt. “Buy me a drink!”

she said, grasping his arm. A flap of flesh at her throat fluttered, and Jim realized her throat had been slashed. “Buy me a drink!” she insisted.

“No,” Jim said, trying to break free. “No, I’m sorry.”

“You’re the one who kil ed me!” she screamed. Her grip tightened, about to snap Jim’s forearm.

“Yes you are! You kil ed me, didn’t you?” And she picked up an empty beer bottle off the bar, her face contorted with rage, and started to smash it against his skul .

But before the blow could fal a man lifted her off her feet and pul ed her away from Jim; her fingernails flayed to the bones of Jim’s arm. She was stil screaming, fighting to pul away, and the man, who wore a T-shirt with
Boneyard
painted across it, said, “She’s a fresh one. Sorry, mac,” before he hauled her toward the entrance. The woman’s scream got shril er, and Jim saw her forehead burst open and ooze like a stomped snail. He shuddered, backing into a dark corner—and there he bumped into another body.

“Excuse me,” he said. Started to move away. Glanced at whom he’d col ided with.

And saw her.

She was trembling, her skinny arms wrapped around her chest. She stil had most of her long brown hair, but in places it had diminished to the texture of spiderwebs and her scalp showed.

Stil , it was lovely hair. It looked almost healthy. Her pale blue eyes were liquid and terrified, and her face might have been pretty once. She had lost most of her nose, and gray-rimmed craters pitted her right cheek. She was wearing sensible clothes: a skirt and blouse and a sweater buttoned to the throat. Her clothes were dirty, but they matched. She looked like a librarian, he decided. She didn’t belong in the Boneyard—but, then, where did anyone belong anymore?