The Hungry Dead (10 page)

Then the zombie stepped on a wet bar of soap.

His legs whooshed out from under him, and Sally used his own weight and momentum against him, as she had learned in her jujitsu classes, to spin and shove him down, splashing him backward into the bathtub.

He grunted and groaned, his dead, stiff hands slipping on the walls of the tub as he tried to pull himself up, still growling viciously at Sally.

He managed to sit up, got one foot out of the tub and onto the floor, and started to arise . . .

Sally backed into the corner again. Then her eyes fell upon the hair dryer. She snatched it up and turned it on.

The zombie was halfway up now.

She dropped the hair dryer into the tub, and electricity sparked and sizzled.

The zombie screamed—a horrid sound that was not quite like anything human. He fell all the way back into the tub, and the current zapped through him.

As he burned up, Sally bravely—and she knew
crazily
—took a fleeting moment to run hot water over her maggoty hands and dry them on her jeans. Then she stepped gingerly around the electrocuted zombie who was still sizzling and burning, and ran from the bathroom.

But now two more zombies were in the hall.

At first, they seemed as stunned to see
her
as she was to see
them.
They hissed and reeled back, but then they came at her.

She couldn't make it to the stairs because they were blocking the way. So she pivoted, ran into her room, and slammed the door, bolting it just in time. Hastily, breathing hard and scared out of her wits, she pushed her nightstand against the door, sending the telephone, lamp, and other stuff flying to the floor.

The two zombies were now pounding at her locked door, and it was starting to give way under the frenzied onslaught. It was the kind of door with a largely hollow, wood-framed interior, built for privacy rather than strength. A hard-punching fist could crash all the way through it. And the screws that were holding the bolt were starting to rip loose.

Sally ran to a window, unlocked it, and opened it as wide as it would go. Then she knocked out the screen.

From under her bed she pulled out a cardboard box containing a rope and hook device that could be used in emergencies as a fire-escape ladder. Desperately she fumbled with it because the ropes and the hardware were unusable and all tangled up.

The screws holding the bolt popped, and the bedroom door started to open as it was pushed against the nightstand she had put in place there.

Sally finally got the hook and rope device untangled, ran to the opened widow, set the hooks in place on the lower window jamb, and dropped the rope with its knotted rungs out the window and down the side of the house. But it fell about six feet shy of the ground.

By this time, there was a zombie jam-up at the bedroom door, three or four of them trying to get in all at once and mindlessly impeding their own progress.

Sally hoisted herself out the window and scrambled with her feet to catch hold of a ropy rung of the ladder. She slipped and almost fell thirty feet, but managed to hang on with her hands clinging to a shoulder-wrenching grip on the ropes, and then she started to descend. At the end of the dangling rope ladder, she had to let go, and it was a long hard drop. Her knees crumbled as her boots struck the ground, and she fell to the turf. But she quickly bounced back up, shaken and yet amazed that she hadn't broken any bones.

She ran for the barn, calling out to her mother. “Mom! Mom! Where are you?”

She stopped short, frozen in horror, when she came upon the pack of zombies slavering over her mother's remains. She let out a scream. And some of the zombies got up and started to come after her.

She ran out into the field. But she saw more zombies out there, so she abruptly changed direction and cut toward the woods. In among the trees she ran past a party of zombies who seemed to be heading in the direction she had come from, but they were so slow that she got past them, skirting about ten yards around them, and she ran and ran till she came to the pond in the clearing where earlier she and her mother had watered their horses.

To her surprise, Sparky was standing by the pond, panting hard, his reins hanging down to the ground, and she gasped out his name. The palomino snorted, eyeing her warily, greatly disturbed by all that had happened. She could tell he was very edgy, and she feared he might panic and take off again.

“Easy now, boy, easy,” she murmured softly. “Easy, Sparky. You know I'm your old buddy now . . . and you know I need you . . .”

The horse shied and backed away, but then stood still again and snorted.

Sally eased close enough to take hold of the reins, and then she mounted, somewhat surprised that in his agitated state Sparky still let her. She settled into the saddle and petted him, soothing him as best she could, saying, “Come on, Sparky, we have to get out of here, boy. Let's go find Daddy.”

They trotted out of the clearing toward a wooded path.

Soon Sally got Sparky into a slow trot.

But around a twisting bend in the path, two zombies stepped out from the foliage, making the palomino whinny and rear up, almost dropping Sally. It was all she could do to hang on to the reins.

Sparky clobbered one zombie with his slashing hooves, and Sally beat at the other, using the long leather reins as a whip. That zombie, a teenage girl with wild, tangled red hair, a scarred and bloody face, and big yellowish teeth, backed off under the whipping Sally was giving her. And Sally spurred her horse, trampling over the downed one—a gray-haired zombified old man—while the redheaded teenage one grabbed on to one of Sally's legs and one of her saddle straps. She dragged the undead creature along, spurring Sparky faster and whipping the zombie's face some more with the reins, till finally she dropped off.

Sally kept going, riding Sparky hard.

Henry Brinkman's roadhouse had a large neon sign that said
HENRY'S HIDEAWAY.
Out back was a woodshed, a Dumpster, and a garage-sized toolshed. Henry's pickup truck and an older model car were the only vehicles in the gravel parking lot.

Inside, there was a dance floor, a jukebox, mounted animal heads spaced around the walls, and a black-powder musket displayed over a large stone fireplace. All the chairs and stools were stacked upside down on the square oaken tables and the Formica-topped bar because the place was not open for business yet. Henry was finishing up his inventory, counting and itemizing the liquor bottles on the tiers of glass shelves behind the bar. He picked the bottles up one at a time, turned them in the dim bar light so he could read the labels, and made notations on a yellow legal pad.

Smokey, a grizzled tobacco chewer in his late sixties, poked his head through the kitchen aperture across from the waitress station at the far end of the bar and said in his crackly, squeaky voice, “Damned if I ain't short of buns again. How'm I supposed to serve people their dogs and burgers? I can cook 'em up, but for sure I gotta put 'em
on
somethin'.”

“
I gave you the money to buy buns,” Henry accused. “What'd you do? Drink it all up again?”

Moving his chew to one side of his mouth, Smokey said, “You ain't never
gimme
no money!”

Henry laughed. “How the hell would you
know,
old man? You were drunk at the time. Your head was screwed on crooked, and your wisdom teeth didn't have any wisdom at all in them. And your head ain't screwed on too tight right now neither.”

The two of them argued like this all the time, and Henry never thought of firing Smokey because he got a kick out of him and because folks liked the old codger, and he did a good job in many ways as a short-order cook, general handyman, and substitute bartender. He was a fixture around the place, having been here through three owners, and Henry had inherited him.

Smokey scratched his grizzled head and mumbled, “Well, ya never . . . I mean . . . did ya?”

“You ain't too sure, are you? Relax, you old fart. I told you I'd buy the buns, and I did. They're in my pickup. I forgot to bring them in.”

“I'll go get 'em.”

“Here are the keys.”

Henry tossed the truck keys onto the counter, and Smokey ducked back from the aperture after he snatched them up. He went out the back door of the roadhouse, which was the kitchen exit, and he wedged the door open so he wouldn't have to struggle with it when his hands were full. Then, as an afterthought, he ducked back inside for some big, bulging garbage bags and took them out to the Dumpster and tossed them in.

He spat tobacco juice into some weeds by the Dumpster, then headed for the pickup truck, going all the way around to the front of the roadhouse where Henry had parked it. He unlocked the passenger door and saw that the bags of buns were there, on the floor between the seat and the dash. He stooped to pick them up.

That was when two zombies pounced on him.

He never had a chance.

The zombies were two big, heavily bearded males, both wearing green workmen's jumpsuits like the kind worn by roofers or plumbers. They looked like they had done lots of heavy work before they became undead.

They slammed Henry against the pickup truck, and he dropped the bags of buns. Dragging him down, they trampled uncaringly all over the buns, mashing them to pulp. One of the zombies was choking Smokey and biting his face. The old man's chaw of tobacco oozed out of his mouth, and his tongue protruded, dripping and brown. He was able to kick and thrash for a while, but then his struggles ceased.

The zombie who was biting his face pulled back momentarily, his mouth and chin a bloody smear.

The other zombie lifted Smokey's limp, dead arm and bared his teeth and licked his lips in anticipation.

 

Meanwhile, inside the saloon, Henry Brinkman was taking upturned chairs down from tabletops in preparation for opening time. He slid a chair roughly into place, then turned around, exasperated, hands on hips. “Smokey!” he called out. “I could sure use some help in here!”

He listened but heard only silence. Then he strode quickly around the bar, through the kitchen, and out onto the slab of porch at the back door, where he stopped and looked left and right.

“Smokey,” he called once again. “Finish your chew and stop lollygagging! We gotta open up in ten minutes!”

No answer.

Henry stepped down off the stoop. He still didn't see the old man, so he moved farther out into the back lot.

And when Henry's back was turned, a large male zombie in a blue short-sleeved shirt and tie shuffled in through the open kitchen door.

Close to his truck now, Henry was puzzled and annoyed to see the passenger door open and the keys lying on the ground. He snatched up the keys, slammed the door shut, spun around, and took a few steps.

Then he froze—because he saw the two jump-suited zombies crouched over Smokey's dead body, tearing him apart. And more zombies were coming out of the surrounding woods—at least eight or nine of them.

Henry spun, gravel flying under his work boots as he ran back across the front lot and in through the kitchen door. He tried to pull it shut behind him, but forgot about the wedge, so that the door wouldn't budge at first, till he kicked the wedge aside, cursing at it.

Then he slammed the door shut and bolted it. It was a heavy steel door with a dead bolt, and Henry tugged hard on it a few times to make sure it was secure, then he turned around and flattened himself against it, breathing hard. He tried to think what to do next. He knew exactly what he was dealing with. The plague had started again. He didn't know why, but it was clearly happening all over again. Thoughts of his wife and daughter slammed into his brain:
Did they know about it? Were they in danger?
He made a move toward the phone out in the bar—

But before he could get to it he heard a heavy rasping sound, and the zombie that he was unaware of—who had entered when his back was turned and the kitchen door was open—now shuffled into the kitchen again, from the main barroom.

Henry was frozen for a long moment, just staring at the undead creature. Then he turned toward the steel door he had just bolted—but he realized futilely that even if he had time to escape from the one in here, there were even more of them outside. And he had locked himself against the danger from outside only to be confronted with unexpected danger from right here in his own kitchen.

The zombie snarled and came toward Henry, and he scrabbled for a butcher knife on the kitchen counter.

The undead being came forward in spite of the knife, too mindless to recognize any threat to itself.

When the zombie lunged at him, Henry plunged his knife into the thing's solar plexus and jumped back from a spurt of blackened blood.

The zombie reeled backward and almost fell because it stumbled over a mop and bucket. But it didn't go down. Pulling itself up by clutching with its stiff, dead hands on the countertop, it stared at the knife buried in its belly.

Then with both zombified hands it slowly pulled the knife out and dropped it onto the floor.

But Henry had time to snatch up a cleaver, and when the zombie came at him again, he delivered a series of hard whacks, hacking into its chest, then its face.

This time the zombie went down, and Henry stepped on him with his boot and hacked and hacked at the thing's head.

Finally the thing seemed totally dead, not “living dead” anymore, and Henry stared down at it, relieved. But then he had the chilling thought that maybe it was just immobilized and not totally finished off—because its eyeballs were twitching, even with the cleaver embedded deep in its skull.

Henry turned toward the bolted steel door. Cautiously he unbolted it and opened it just a sliver so he could peek out. He didn't see any zombies close by, so he opened it wider—and then he saw some, in a cluster by the Dumpster—but they were far enough back that he decided he could risk dragging the “dead” zombie outside.

He grabbed the thing's ankles and dragged it out onto the stoop. Then he quickly reached back to a shelf just inside the door and grabbed a can of lighter fluid and a box of wooden matches.

At this point, the zombies by the Dumpster started to come forward, moving stiffly, emitting heavy, rasping breaths.

Henry doused the vanquished zombie's upper body with lighter fluid and pulled the cleaver, which he thought might still come in handy, out of the zombie's head and tossed it back onto the floor of the kitchen. The zombie's eyes were still twitching when Henry struck a match and set it on fire. With only the upper part of the creature burning at first, he could still grab hold of the ankles, and as the surrounding zombies backed away in fear of the flames, he dragged the burning zombie down off the stoop and farther away from the building. Then he squirted more lighter fluid all over the thing, and the blaze really got going.

Henry backed away toward the kitchen entrance.

Just then he heard hoofbeats on gravel, and his daughter Sally came galloping toward him from the other side of the lot. She pulled Sparky up short, and the zombies moved toward them.

Henry yelled, “Sally! Get inside quick!”

With a frightened glance, she took in all the elements of danger and grisliness here—about two dozen “live” zombies and one who was burning.

“C'mon, Sally,” Henry yelled again. “Or else they'll get you!”

She jumped down from the saddle, smacked Sparky on his rump hard, and shouted, “Go, Sparky!
Go!
” The big stallion whinnied, then galloped across the lot and into the woods, knocking down two zombies as he fled.

Henry pulled his daughter into the kitchen and slammed and bolted the steel door once again. Sobbing, Sally threw herself into her father's arms. She choked out her grief, her voice muffled against his chest. “Oh, Dad . . . Mom didn't make it . . . what are we gonna do?”

Just then the lights in the place blinked a couple of times . . . off . . . then on . . . then off permanently. The roadhouse was windowless except for two grimy windows in the kitchen that let in twin slashes of murky, rudimentary light, and that was all the light that was left after the sudden loss of electrical power.