The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (3 page)

Daniel walked down the corridor, marveling as always at the steady temperature of about 55 degrees, whether it was muggy summer or bleak winter up above. The floor was rough but mostly even, and though the walls got awfully close together at a few points, it was never so tight he had to turn sideways. No one knew when or why this tunnel had been carved, though there were plenty of theories bandied about by the few who knew of its existence, notably: secret interdenominational love affairs; ill-fated attempts at smuggling liquor; a guy getting bored halfway through digging out a basement and wandering off; and a well-meaning but unworldly minister deciding to take part in the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves despite Lake Woebegotten being too far north to be much use, but it was the thought that counted, anyway.
 

These days it was mostly just used as a shortcut to avoid going outside in the winter, though it had been useful for negotiating the peace during the Great Lutheran-Catholic Bake Sale War of 1979.
 

When Daniel reached the other end of the corridor, which opened out into a little stone room with a scrounged couch, a wobbly desk, and a couple of folding chairs, Father Edsel was already waiting for him. The priest was wearing four sweaters and an earflap hat. He’d been assigned to Lake Woebegotten from Galveston, Texas, twenty years before and had never gotten used to the weather. He was known to wear mittens well into spring, and if the parishioners hadn’t complained, he would have kept Our Lady of Eventual Tranquility “a balmy 85 degrees” year-round, and expected the flock to pay his heating bill.

“I suppose you’ve heard then,” Edsel said in that grizzled old-timey prospector voice of his.
 

“Heard what?”

Edsel sat at the desk, pulled open the drawer, and began laboriously laying out his preferred accoutrements of sin: a pipe, pouch of tobacco, and several small pipe-cleaning implements. “The dead are coming back to life. Hell unleashed on Earth. You didn’t hear? It’s all over the radio.”

By “the radio” Daniel assumed Edsel meant the online radio stations on his computer, because normal radio stations you could hear in Lake Woebegotten didn’t carry the kind of conspiracy theories Edsel thrived on: tales of reptilian overlords, the secret machinations of the Batrachian Illuminati (a branch of the Bavarian Illuminati populated solely by the immortal survivors of the lost city of Atlantis), consensual alien abductions, brainwashed sleeper agent Congressmen, and secret military units devoted to exploding the heads of mountain goats by will alone. If pressed, Edsel would admit that he didn’t believe in aliens or Atlanteans or reptoids, but he
did
believe in Satan, the Adversary, the Prince of the Morning, Big Red, Lucifer, Shaytan, the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, Old Nick, Mr. Scratch, the Tempter, the Old Serpent, the Lord of this World, Old Hob, the Prince of the Powers of the Air and Darkness, Mephistopheles, the First of the Fallen, Mister Dis, Old Gooseberry, the Angel of the Pit, and the Author of Evil, AKA the Devil. All the workings of various conspiracies could be traced back to Satan, and everyone who saw aliens or reptile-men or Sasquatches or Mothmen was really seeing Satan and his minions.
 

The rumor was Edsel had even taken part in an exorcism, a real pea-souper, back in the days before the church frowned on such things.
 

Daniel was less sure about the existence of the devil, though Martin Luther, the namesake of the Lutheran church, had been unequivocal on the subject—he’d encountered the Devil frequently, often while sleeping or having a bowel movement, and found arguing with Satan no more remarkable than bickering with his wife, once going so far as to tell Satan to suck the shit out of his anus. (Early Lutherans were an earthy bunch.) Nevertheless, most Lutherans Daniel knew tended to be more worried about the price of seed corn and diesel fuel than the perils of direct Satanic influence, which, all in all, was the sensible position.
 

“I had a strange phone call from a colleague,” Daniel admitted. “Saying the dead were rising and attacking people. I thought I’d come to see if you’d heard anything odd from your contacts in the cities.”

“The archdiocese doesn’t even remember I’m out here. This parish doesn’t show up on any of the maps because the bishop from back when the organizational charts were drawn up hated the priest here. Ever since then Lake Woebegotten has been a kind of Siberia for priests. Though I fought for the placement, myself. I had too much meddling down in Texas, and it’s nice to be left alone.” Edsel filled his pipe. “As for the dead coming back to life, that’s easy enough to test. Come with me to see Mrs. Mormont. She’s not long for this world. The doctor just called and said I should come over when I have a moment to administer last rites, if it’s not too much trouble, maybe if her house is on my way to someplace I’m going already. I was just on my way out when you rang the bell.” The bell system had been installed during the Bake Sale War when the Catholic and Lutheran ministers had been unable to contact one another directly for fear of reprisal, and so they’d worked out a way to hold clandestine meetings in the tunnel that connected the two church basements. “If she wakes up with a hankering for brains, we’ll know the stories are true.”

“I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to be at the deathbed of a woman of another faith. It might be seen as an attempt at… poaching, I guess.”

Father Edsel grunted and puffed his pipe, clouds of sweet-smelling smoke rising. Daniel had never smelled tobacco like Edsel smoked anywhere else, and he wondered sometimes if it
was
tobacco, but wasn’t prepared to address the question. “Widow Mormont hasn’t been conscious for days. I don’t think anyone’s too worried about a deathbed conversion. What do you say?”

“Well, I suppose I could ride along. I don’t think there’s anything to all this about the living dead, mind you, but if it would help set your mind at rest, I’ll come.”

“It’ll do you good to grapple with Satan,” Edsel said. “The soul’s like a muscle. You have to make it work to make it strong.”

4. The Sixth
Commandment

D
olph, proprietor of Dolph’s Half Good Grocery (so called for its slogan, “It Isn’t Half Bad!”), stood out back on the loading dock and made cryptic hand gestures meant to guide the delivery truck driver in. Though the driver had done this every week for years, he still came in at a slant or scraped his bumper on the railing by the steps half the time, and today he was even unsteadier than usual. “Running late today!” Dolph called when the driver emerged with his clipboard, keeping his voice cheerful, though he was actually mad enough about the delay to eat lead and spit bullets.

“Sorry,” the driver said, handing over the clipboard and raising up the sliding door at the back of the truck. “Traffic like you wouldn’t believe on the freeway past the warehouse, some kind of pile-up, biggest I’ve ever seen.”

“Hope nobody was hurt.” Dolph ran his eyes across the inventory sheet on the clipboard while the driver began hauling boxes out and setting them on the loading dock, willing the man to move faster, faster, faster.

Instead the driver paused, looked Dolph in the eye, and shook his head once. “I saw at least five cars. Three of ’em upside down. There’s not a lot of traffic out there in the middle of the day, and the roads were fresh plowed, so I don’t know what happened. There were a couple of wreckers and an ambulance and three police cars off on the side, and somebody’d moved the cars out of the way, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.”

“Probably just inside the ambulance trying to get out of this cold,” Dolph said meaningfully, glancing up at the sky, which was the steel-gray of a dignified old patriarch’s hair.
 

“Could be,” the driver said, and went back to work double-time, passing boxes over to Dolph, who heaped them haphazardly on the dock. “I heard some funny stuff on the radio, though, apparently all heck’s breaking loose over in St. Paul, some kind of epidemic—”

“Yep, I heard something was going around,” Dolph said. “That’s winter for you. Cold and wet makes you sick.”

The driver paused again. “Well, I don’t know. Some folks say it’s viruses and bacteria and such that make you sick, not getting cold.” He put his hands up by his temples and waggled his gloved forefingers like antenna. “You know. Little bugs.”

“So that’s about all the boxes then.”

The driver looked into the empty back of the truck for a long time, as if maybe a box had eluded him, then nodded. “Yep.”

“Looks good to me,” Dolph said, handing back the clipboard with the signed delivery sheet. “Drive safe now. Stay warm.”

“You bet,” the driver said.

Dolph looked at the boxes piled there on the dock, thought about the time it would take to get them loaded on the dolly and the pallet jack and take them into the storeroom at the back of the grocery, looked at his watch, and raced for the front of the store. A quick glance up and down the aisles showed no customers—typical in this weather—and Clem, the high-school dropout stockboy/cashier/all-around-dogsbody with the lazy eye, was arranging cans of beans on the shelf according to some arcane system of his own devising, possibly relating to label color.

“You might wanna go over to the bank for some quarters,” Dolph said. “No big rush. I think you might be running low.” He hoped so. He’d taken just about all the change out of the register and hidden it in his office that morning.

“Oh, I guess so.” Clem nodded slowly. “You okay here by yourself?”

“I can manage. Why don’t you take a break and get a little lunch over at the Cafe while you’re out? Take your time, have a cup of coffee, maybe bring me back a ham and cheese if you think about it, no big deal though.”

“Sure thing.” Clem went about the painstaking business of finding his coat and scarf and gloves—one glove was over in the freezer section for some reason—and then paused at the door with a little wave before walking out.

Dolph loitered by the front door, and a moment later, Eileen Munson came in carrying a purse as big as a mail bag, looking shapeless in her oversized brown coat, though he knew the shape underneath pretty well by this time.
 

“Some guys wouldn’t keep a gal waiting like that,” she said, and Dolph grunted, shut the door, turned the lock, and hung up the little sign that said “Back in fifteen minutes.” Eileen was already gone, vanished into his office, and Dolph went in after her, excitement rising as it always did on Eileen’s shopping day. A lot of the town’s women drove half an hour to the super Wal-Mart over in Dodgewood to do their shopping lately, but Eileen was his most reliable customer.

When Dolph stepped into his cluttered office, Eileen was leaning on the edge of his desk, her clothes in a neat pile on top of the battered filing cabinet, dressed only in some of the most complicated underwear Dolph had ever seen—there were stockings and garters and a sort of bustier thing that didn’t quite cover her bosoms and a little lace choker thing around her neck and black high-heeled shoes with little feathery puffs on top and lacy ribboned skimpy underwear that didn’t leave much to the imagination, which was okay though, because Dolph had never had much of an imagination anyway.

“You like it?” Eileen said, with that little half-smile she always had when she was showing off something new. “Got it off the internet.”

“It’s a heckuva deal if you ask me,” Dolph said, sweeping the files off his couch while simultaneously dropping his pants.

“You old sweet talker,” she said, and he pulled her over to him.
 

Fifteen minutes wasn’t ever long enough, but then again, it did get the job done.

After they were finished and dressed again and sitting on the couch instead of doing other things, Dolph poured her a cup of coffee from the thermos on his desk and had one for himself, and looked at her silently for a while. Eileen was just a hair past forty, both the kids she’d had recently off to college, husband obsessed with restoring the vintage Mustang in his garage (though you’d think he’d get sick of cars, what with running a dealership all day), and she’d been visiting Dolph for the past six months or so, every week, usually wearing something new. She might not be one of those magazine fashion models or Girls Gone Wild like you saw on the late night TV, but she had a sweet pretty face and nice full hips and a good set of curves on her. He said, “How your husband can spend all his time tinkering in the garage when he’s got you in the house, I don’t know.”

She sipped her coffee demurely, which always impressed him, since she wasn’t so demure, other times. “He hasn’t touched me in months, and when he does, he doesn’t like the lights on. He’s ashamed of his belly, I think, like I expect him to look the same as he did when he was playing high school football, like time doesn’t march on over all of us.” She shrugged. “This is more fun. Like playing dress up. Sure gives me something to look forward to every week, better than the Lutheran Women’s Circle. But how do you feel about it? You know—adultery?”

“Technically speaking I don’t believe it’s adultery for me. I’m not married, after all. I’m committing some other kind of sin, no doubt, but not that one.”

Eileen shook her head. “I like to know what I’m up to. I looked it up. Minnesota law says, ‘when a married woman has sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whether married or not, both are guilty of adultery.’ Both. That’s you too. Burns me up that it doesn’t say anything about a husband doing it though. So as long at Brent sleeps with some unmarried girl, that’s okay?” She paused. “Not that I think he would. He’s only got eyes for that Mustang he’s been rebuilding.”

Dolph shifted a little on the couch. He was an adulterer? He’d always figured, since he wasn’t actually breaking any vows, he was in the clear, and the bulk of the burden of sin was sitting squarely on Eileen. “You should probably do your shopping,” he said. “Clem’ll be back soon, don’t want him to suspect anything.”

Eileen rolled her eyes. “That boy’s dim, just like his whole family. We could do the naked watusi in the produce section and he wouldn’t figure anything out. But I do need to pick up a few things.” She leaned over, pecked his cheek, and gave his crotch a friendly squeeze, making him jump. He waited a few moments for things in his loin area to subside before rising himself, and found her filling a basket from his tiny fancy-food half-shelf, with the stuffed grape leaves and truffle-infused olive oil and Belgian chocolates and other such things that he’d finally started carrying at the insistence of some of the summer people. Eileen was the only local who ever bought them, and she didn’t buy them, exactly, since their arrangement had evolved to the point where she got to walk out the door with two big free grocery sacks full of whatever she could carry after one of their rendezvous (which he pronounced “randy-voos” for the comical value), something that struck Dolph as a little too close to paying for a lady’s affection, though Eileen saw it differently: “Most guys would buy a gal dinner first. You just buy dinner after. It’s like you get to eat your dessert first. Isn’t that every little boy’s dream?”