The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (21 page)

“Gentlemen,” Edsel said. “There’s punch and cake over in the reception hall. We’ll hand out your patrol assignments there. God bless you all for your service and your courage.” He clapped his hands, an applause of one, and the men—and Eileen—made their way out, until it was just Edsel, Daniel, and Stevie Ray.
 

“Quite a posse you’ve got there,” Stevie Ray said.

“Brave men and true!” Edsel shouted. He pointed at the figure of Christ on the cross, and as always, Daniel winced when he saw it—the blood, the crown of thorns, the droopy hangdog eyes, the jutting ribs, the loincloth, give him a nice clean cross anytime, who wanted to be reminded of all that suffering every time you wanted to think about God? “Satan torments us with a mockery of our Lord and Savior, the one man who’s ever
truly
risen from the dead.”

“Well,” Daniel said. “There was Lazarus. And of course the boy the prophet Elijah brought back to life. Plus the dead son of the Shunammite woman resurrected by the prophet Elisha, and the dead body that came back to life when it touched Elisha’s bones in the tomb, and the various dead saints who arose and entered Jerusalem after Jesus’ own resurrection, and Dorcas who was returned to life by Peter, and Eutychus who fell from the window… lots of others.”

“None of them were
immortal
,” Edsel said. “Only Christ was granted physical immortality.”

“The zombies aren’t too immortal, either,” Stevie Ray said. “They die just fine when you take off the head.”

“Daniel—ha, not me, the biblical Daniel, of course, said, ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.’” Daniel had brooded over that passage lately. It seemed to him that it meant something very different from what he’d always assumed it meant. “Perhaps the zombies are those who are disgraced?”

“They are dead bodies inhabited by demons sent by Satan,” Edsel said flatly. “It’s as obvious as knowing water is wet, snow is cold, and monkeys—and their antics—are hilarious. We will kill these creatures, all of them we can, and prove ourselves worthy for the eventual return of our Lord.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Stevie Ray said, “At least we don’t have to worry about zombie monkeys. I’d sure hate to be in the rainforest right about now.”

11

“C
ome on, Chief. You know I’m the man this town needs now. I’m finally in my element.” Mr. Levitt sat comfortably in the chair behind Stevie Ray’s desk. He still had his gun, and Stevie Ray was still holding his service pistol, but neither of them were pointing their weapons at the other anymore. Rufus was sitting in the corner by his dead uncle, holding his head in his hands. At some point this had stopped being a hostage situation, exactly, and had become a negotiation instead.

“You’re a confessed murderer,” Stevie Ray said, still half-hidden from Levitt’s line of sight by the coat tree near the front door. The coat tree wasn’t cover, but it was concealment, which was something. If Levitt shot him maybe he wouldn’t get the headshot, and Stevie Ray could at least take comfort that he’d return as a zombie and eat the son of a gun. “You think I’m going to let you walk around loose in this town?”

“Who knows about my… colorful history? You, the boy, Dolph. Harry did, but he’s dead, and the same with Otto. Why, if I wanted to, I could reduce the number of witnesses to one, right now, and do you think I’d have a hard time hunting a
grocer
? I could slip back into my role as a respected pillar of society like
that
.” He snapped his fingers. “So how about we do it without the bloodshed? Don’t get me wrong, I like bloodshed, live for it, but I’m taking the long view. I think I’d have more fun as the town’s heroic zombie-hunter, adored by all. And if your little fairy tale comes true and civilization is restored, and the judges start coming back to town, why, you can take me back into custody and see justice served.”

The fact was, having Levitt in jail was a pain in the ass. Someone always needed to be here with him, to make sure he didn’t escape or kill himself, though the former was looking increasingly moot and the latter was never likely, since rattlesnakes, proverbially, didn’t commit suicide. “How do I know you won’t go on a killing spree?”

“They didn’t require an abnormal psychology class or criminology studies for your job as a bartender, Chief? I’m not a disorganized spree killer. I’m
organized
. Methodical. I’m a planner. It’s not my inclination to run through town pumping bullets into people. I find the whole idea… distasteful. Worse, boring. And if I wanted to kill people, I would have killed Rufus there. And you, when you walked in the door—an ambush would not have been difficult to set up. I
didn’t
—there’s all the proof of my sincerity you need. Hear me well: I’m not going back into that cell. I’m
bored
in there. Pushing your psychological buttons is about as challenging as playing tic-tac-toe with a chicken. I need something to engage my mind. So let me be a zombie killer, join the little task force the preachers have set up—I hear they’re down a man.” He nodded toward the body of Otto.
 

Stevie Ray considered. Levitt was rational. Crazy, yes, certainly, crazy as the winter nights were long, but not a raving madman. And he certainly wouldn’t balk at putting any zombies down, human or otherwise. Most importantly, the
only
way this situation could end was either in a hail of bullets, or in granting Mr. Levitt’s request to serve the town. “You’ll need to put down the gun. First step.”

“I can do that. But you have to let me out of here, Chief. It’s not optional. Maybe you see an old man when you look at me, but push me, and you might be surprised.”

“Understood. The gun?”

Levitt looked at him—or at the coat rack, though he sure seemed to be looking
through
the coat rack—and laid his pistol on the desk.
 

“Rufus,” Stevie Ray barked. “Get the gun.”

Rufus looked up blankly, then nodded, walked over about as slow as a fella with gout and bunions and plantar fascitis, and picked up the gun. He plodded back to the spot by his dead uncle and sat back down.
 

“All right,” Stevie Ray said. “I have conditions. One: you will wear a tracking bracelet. Harry got a couple of them with the Homeland Security money, those house arrest things, go around your ankle, tamperproof, we always know exactly where you are.”

“Fine with me,” Levitt said. “Still a lot more privacy than I had in that box.”
 

“Two: you
will
be brought to justice. Either some higher authority will set things right and the world will go back to normal, or this town will elect a new mayor and get its organizational eggs in a row, and when that happens, I’ll tell whoever takes charge what you are, who you are, and how ironclad the proof is. I’m also going to leave some of that evidence in a location known only to me, to be opened if I die,
or
Rufus dies,
or
Dolph dies—you won’t be picking off the witnesses.”

“You’re living in the past, Chief—the days of swift and fair trials are over, so what do I care if there are witnesses? But, of course, if those measures console you, I have no objection.” Levitt was grinning, hands laced behind his head, stocking feet up on the desk, happy as a pig in poop.
 

“The last condition,” Stevie Ray said, “is your first target: that zombie dog that killed Clem and Otto.”

The smile froze on Levitt’s face, then melted and drained away. “My Alta? No, don’t be ridiculous, I’m not going to—”

Stevie Ray came around the coat tree, gun extended. “It’s the price you pay for your freedom, Mr. Levitt. Come on. You’re supposed to be a hard man. Can’t kill one little dog?”

Levitt smiled again, but there was no joy in it now, more one primate showing his teeth to another in aggression. “I can kill
anything
, Chief. Be good for you to remember that.”

“I’m the one with the gun now.”

“Never liked guns anyway. Give me a boning knife anytime.”

Stevie Ray pushed the safety off.

Levitt sighed. “Fine, fine, I’ll kill Alta, I suppose he’s not my little precious anymore anyway.”

“Okay,” Stevie Ray said. “Let’s get you hooked up with that bracelet. Rufus, you want to keep that gun on our guest until he’s got his nice new jewelry on?”

Rufus nodded, though he still didn’t speak, and rose to his feet.

“This will be fun,” Mr. Levitt said. “Do you think I can get a badge? I’d love to have my own badge.”

12

T
he Catholic Christmas Pageant went beautifully at first, with kids dressed in choir robes as angels, holy singing—the Catholics do beautiful hymns, you can say what you like but you can’t deny that, something about hearing words sung in Latin speaks to the heart, maybe because you can imagine they’re saying anything at all, anything that speaks to your own heart and sense of the sacred—and, of course, the Nativity story, because no small-town pageant is complete without a ten-year-old playing the Virgin Mary and two young wise men who are slowly coming to realize they never even asked what frankincense and myrrh
are
, and why does that other kid get to be the one who hands out the gold, never mind asking what a baby would do with gold, anyway.
 

The pageant took place in the hall attached to the Catholic church, where a stage had been set up and a bunch of folding chairs brought in. The children blundered through their lines with customary aplomb, and turnout hadn’t been affected too adversely by the appearance last week of zombies. None of the kids had really seen any zombies, and though the power had stopped working most everybody had fuel for their generators and oil for their furnaces and their pantries were stocked, so the ongoing disaster was largely abstract for the children—and only slightly less so for their parents. It was in almost all ways a typical Christmas pageant.

Until the boy playing Joseph pulled the blanket away from the wooden cradle as prelude to lifting up the traditional baby Jesus, veteran of countless pageants—the baby was a doll, and in fact a
girl
doll judging by the eyelashes, but that doll had served as the infant Jesus for a long time and issues of potentially transgender religious icons were generally ignored.

Except that doll was gone, and in its place barely fitting into a cradle that had in fact always rather dwarfed the doll, there was a zombie: one with no arms or legs, true, but that was even more grotesque if somewhat less dangerous than a whole zombie, and young Joseph screamed and jumped back (fortunately retaining his full complement of fingers), and all the other children screamed too, and then a general exodus began from the stage—Exodus not usually being a component of a Catholic Christmas pageant, or really Christmas stories in general, but the ad-lib seemed justified by the circumstances—with children in angel robes and shepherd robes (basically the same robes, if you wanted to get picky) leaping into the laps of their parents, screaming “Zombie zombie zombie Jesus!” and similar cries, except for those who took the more elemental route of just sobbing. General bedlam threatened to take hold, until Father Edsel strode onto the stage from the wings, holding a big long knife.
 

Without hesitation he stepped to the cradle, looked down at the zombie—which no one in the audience had really seen, except maybe the ones on their feet in the front row, owing to its literally low profile—and then drove the knife into the zombie’s eye. The force of his blow was too much for the cradle—which was wooden, and not too well-made to begin with, and also a veteran of countless pageants—and it simply splintered into a few big pieces right there on the stage, with the dead torso of a murder victim, transformed by energies or causes unknown (if much speculated-upon) into a ravenous monster, and then transformed again by causes generally mysterious (though a few people in town knew about Levitt’s chainsaw) into the limbless parody of a monster it was now.

Then Edsel pressed a button on the hilt of the knife and the zombie’s head exploded like a grapefruit stuffed with firecrackers. The patter of exploded headmeat did nothing to calm the crowd.
 

Edsel kicked the body once or twice, a ferociously concentrated look on his face (though whether it was concentrated rage, hate, disgust, or some other emotion no one could quite agree), then, satisfied it was dead, turned to face the now largely silent but still highly keyed-up crowd. “People of Lake Woebegotten!” he boomed. “This creature is an agent of the devil, but it did not slip into this cradle to torment us on its own. It was placed here by hands—
human hands
! We face not only unholy creatures risen from Hell, but human collaborators as well, perhaps Satanists, perhaps mere agents of chaos, perhaps pranksters unaware of how their latest prank endangers their very immortal
souls
! Be vigilant!”

He paused, then stooped, picked up the cradle blanket, and draped it over the limbless corpse. “The pageant is over. Give the children a round of applause.”

The crowd complied with subdued clapping, though it wasn’t entirely clear what, or who, they were clapping for.
 

13

I
ngvar Knudsen had a big house full of not much but emptiness, ancient wooden furniture, his dead wife’s vast collection of antique teapots, including teapots shaped like chickens, pumpkins (and other melons, including a few summer squash), the heads of Indian chiefs, basketballs, boots, penguins, pilgrims, sailing ships, bears, gazelles, gargoyles, pandas, and the Roman Coliseum. She’d never intended to be a teapot collector—she’d had a couple of nice antique Fiesta teapots she liked, and a silver tea service she’d inherited and kept out for display—but some relative noticed her three teapots in the kitchen and decided she must be a collector, and so it began. Anyone unfortunate to be deemed a collector by their relatives can share this tale of woe, because every Christmas and birthday sees the same thing: a procession of variations on whatever it is you’re supposed to be collecting, whether it’s teapots, snow globes, unicorn statuettes, novelty socks, candlestick holders, or salt shakers, with relatives smiling widely at their finds and the collector outwardly grateful but increasingly thinking
where am I going to put all these
and
who’s going to dust them
? But the teapots reminded Ingvar of his late wife, so he kept them all, arrayed on the shelves he’d built for her in their big old farmhouse kitchen, and he kept them dusted, too, though otherwise he was an indifferent housekeeper and considered it a job well done if he didn’t track pig manure in on the rug. Since he’d sold all his land to the quarrymen, rock dust was more likely than pig manure, and that made him sad, but he’d wanted to be sure to provide a nice inheritance for his grandchildren, all of whom lived away, and none of whom had been much interested in continuing the family farm; no wonder, since their parents, Ingvar’s own children, hadn’t wanted to, either.