8. The Pretty Much Average-Length Arm of the Law
“How long do I have to sit on him?” Otto asked.
“Until Harry and Stevie Ray get here.” Dolph shifted a little on the couch, but kept the nose of the gun pointed at Mr. Levitt, who was lying face-down on the floor, apparently unbothered by having his face mere inches from a pool of leaky zombie gore, with Otto sitting on top of him, butt planted between his shoulder blades, legs on either side.
“What if he tries something?” Otto asked. “I’m not able to defend myself too well like this.”
“You outweigh him by forty pounds, Otto. He’s an old man. I wouldn’t worry.”
Otto nodded toward the limbless zombie, which still grunted and did its best to turn over, stuck on its back like a turtle. “That guy there’s got forty pounds on me, and Mr. Levitt didn’t have any trouble taking him out.”
“I had my tools with me then,” Mr. Levitt offered, tone perfectly reasonable, if a bit muffled from having his face pressed most of the way into the carpet. “And he didn’t see it coming. He was a real victim of opportunity. I was never much of a stalker, couldn’t be bothered, but I happened upon him broken down out on old route 15, cell phone getting no reception, and offered to bring him here to use the phone, told him I’d talk to the mechanic for him, make sure he got the local’s price instead of being charged an arm and a leg. He was grateful right up until the point I put the needle in his neck. Heh.” Levitt’s laugh was nasty, and his whole body shook with it, sending unpleasant vibrations up through Otto’s bottom parts.
“This is sick.” Rufus came in from the hallway, holding an old-fashioned bag of the sort country doctors once used, when the world was a better place and people made house calls and nobody knew what HMO stood for and you could pay your medical bill with a bushel of corn or maybe a couple of chickens. Of course they didn’t have polio vaccine or chemotherapy back then, so maybe the changing times weren’t all bad. “It’s all full of finger bones.”
“That’s a good boy, get those fingerprints all over everything.” Levitt cackled again. “Not that it much matters, but in case the civil authorities do get things under control and avert the apocalypse and take me to trial, I appreciate any crime-scene contamination you want to do.”
Rufus dropped the bag and moaned, wiping his hands on his shirt. “I went down in the cellar, the dirt’s all soft, and there are gaping holes where I guess these zombies came climbing out.”
“I always meant to pour concrete down there, cover them all over, I figured, I’m an old man, I’m retired, why do I need my own little personal burial ground anymore? But I just couldn’t do it. What if somebody came to the door all alone one afternoon with a petition, nobody else on the street, where would I put him when I was done?”
“Just shut up, please.” Otto pressed down on the back of Mr. Levitt’s head with the palm of his hand.
A hard rap came at the door. “Come on in!” Dolph said, and the town policemen, Harry and Stevie Ray, entered. Both wore beige uniforms, but the similarities ended there. Harry was in his early fifties, and his big beer gut preceded him wherever he went, and he had enormous muttonchop sideburns as if hoping to disguise the fact that he was going bald on top. Stevie Ray was one of Lake Woebegotten’s few black residents, in his late twenties, and he’d done a stint in the Marines and still kept up a good exercise regime, so he didn’t have a gut so much, and he had a shaved head, which always made Otto feel cold in sympathy, especially in winter like this. He was a part-time police officer, and also worked as a bartender (and, when the need arose, drunk-remover) at the Backtrack Bar.
When Stevie Ray saw Dolph’s gun, he unholstered his pistol and pointed it at him.
“Don’t point that at me!” Dolph yelled, setting the rifle down by the couch, barrel pointed up and away. “Point it at old man Levitt! I told you on the phone, he’s a serial killer! He’s dangerous!”
“He doesn’t look like much of a threat right now.” Stevie Ray’s eyes did a quick scan of the room, taking in the various dead bodies, the signs of struggle, the bloody chainsaw, and all the rest without any obvious reaction. “We got a mess in here,” he said at last. “Otto, get up, let me put handcuffs on Mr. Levitt, that’s a little better than you sitting on him.”
Otto rose, and Stevie Ray slid right in, pressing a knee on Mr. Levitt’s back. “If this is a mistake, you have my apologies in advance,” Stevie Ray said. “But for the time being it seems like everybody’d feel better if you didn’t have your hands free.” He snapped the bracelets onto Mr. Levitt’s bony wrists.
The elderly killer lifted his head from the carpet and said, “I never did a black one. None ever came wandering by, and there are so few of you in town I knew any of you’d be missed. Oh well. Hope springs eternal.”
“I’ve got you on threatening a peace officer if nothing else,” Stevie Ray said, rising. “Why don’t you just stay there on the carpet?”
“How can you be so calm?” Dolph said, outraged. “There are chainsaw murder victims in here! Undead monsters! Lake Woebegotten’s answer to a geriatric John Wayne Gacy—”
“Gacy!” Levitt was outraged. “A clown, and worse, a buffoon! The only thing we have in common is where we bury the bodies, and—”
“Everybody calm down.” Harry’s voice was slow and deliberate, and his oxlike expression and measured tones made people assume he was the stupid one and Stevie Ray was the smart one, but in fact they were both pretty smart. “Stevie Ray, you want to make sure the area’s secure? I’ll see what I can ascertain about the, ah…”
“Zombies?” Rufus offered.
Harry sighed like an inflatable couch sagging under the weight of one too many fat relatives at Christmas. “Yep. I guess that’s it. Who here knows the most about them?”
“Me,” Rufus said. “I’ve seen lots of them today. They were all over the cities this morning. I drove here to warn people, you know.”
Harry nodded. He strolled over to the limbless zombie and said, “You ever play that zombie game Left 4 Dead?”
Rufus, sounding surprised, said, “Sure, man, all the time, but mostly the sequel lately, it’s harder, but so much scarier.”
Harry nodded. “Thing I never understood about that game is, it’s the zombie apocalypse, and everything’s gone to heck, and there’s those piles of guns and ammunition and painkillers and gas cans and stuff just sitting there all over the place for people to pick up.”
“The game wouldn’t be much fun without guns and explosions though.”
“You got me there. Not much fun at all.”
“How can you be talking about games?” Otto said. He’d played Pong a few times when Rufus was a kid but couldn’t see the point. You might as well go out and just hit a real ball around, why not? And now there was some kind of zombie killing game? Well, so what? How was that supposed to be any help to anybody? Playing Pong wasn’t going to make you a good tennis player, so killing zombies in some video game probably wasn’t too effective as training for killing zombies in the real world.
Harry didn’t pay him any attention, just went on talking about the game. “The thing that really gets me, though, is the syringes of adrenaline, you know, you inject them in the game and you can run faster and fight harder? If it was me, and I saw a full syringe laying on the ground in some burned-out grocery store surrounded by the hungry dead, I’m not so sure I’d just up and stick it into the first vein in my arm I came across.”
“I might,” Rufus said. “But I’d probably be hoping it was something other than adrenaline. Something that would put me out of my misery.”
“That’s a thought,” Harry said. “Why don’t we put this one out of his misery?” He nudged the limbless zombie with his boot.
“First, I don’t think he’s miserable,” Rufus said. “I don’t think he’s feeling anything, other than hungry. And second… he’s proof. Of what’s happening. A real live… well, you know… a real zombie.”
“Guess there might be some value there,” Harry agreed. “Shouldn’t be any harm in it as long as you stay clear of his teeth. So you’ve seen these fellas in action. What can you tell me?”
“They’re slow. They don’t feel pain. They don’t stop until you mess up their brains. Even if you take a head off, it keeps moving, though the body stops.”
“They contagious? Like, they bite you, you catch it?”
“I don’t think it’s a disease,” Rufus said. “It’s just… the dead rising. These bodies were already dead, nobody bit them, they just woke up. So it’s contagious, but only because a zombie can kill you, and when you’re dead, you become one too.”
“Well all right, then.” He hitched up his belt, though it slid back down under the weight of his gut. “Seems like we’ve got a fighting chance then.”
“Against the end of the world?” Mr. Levitt said. “How do you figure that?”
“There’s about 1,000 people in this town or in the farms just outside,” Harry said. “Some of them went down to Florida for the winter, or they’re off visiting family for the holidays, so it’s not quite all of them, but it’s enough. And if it’s just the dead waking up and walking around, not like a real plague, well… How many corpses do we have laying around here on any given day, do you think? If you hadn’t been keeping dead folks in shallow graves in your basement, Mr. Levitt, we might not have even noticed the zombie situation until one of the old folks passed on and tried to eat their relatives. Now maybe in the cities there’s hospitals and morgues full of dead folks and people getting shot dead for their tennis shoes by gangbangers and people overdosing on marijuana and guys jumping off roofs because they can’t stand the pressure of their CEO jobs anymore, but around here things are different. Most winters we only lose a handful of folks, and one of those is usually an unmarried agrarian Norwegian who puts a gun in his mouth, and not to be insensitive, but somebody who blows his brains out is solving any future personal zombie problem right then and there. I’d say it’s definitely a manageable situation here. We’ll call a town meeting, warn everybody to be on the lookout, and we’ll just be careful until this whole mess blows over.”
“It’s not just people turning into zombies,” Dolph said. “I think, anyway. We saw this dog, half run over, and it was still trying to bite…”
“What dog?” Mr. Levitt said. “Alta? Here, Alta, come to Daddy!”
“Your dog’s a zombie dog now,” Otto said. No point trying to pretend something else was happening here now. Hard to admit Rufus had been right all along, but there it was, and he was man enough to admit it.
Mr. Levitt began weeping quietly into the carpet.
“Can I see this zombie dog?” Harry asked.
“It’s in a cooler in the truck, I’ll go get it.” Rufus hurried outside, but he returned a moment later, shaking his head. “The cooler was tipped over, and the lid was open. Alta got away. There was a trail in the snow, going around the house, but, ah…” He looked a little sheepish, but then, Otto thought he always looked a little bit like a sheep, it ran on that side of the family.
“You didn’t want to chase a zombie dog unarmed and there were no handguns and ammo just laying around in the driveway.” Harry’s voice was bland and non-judgmental. “Can’t say I blame you. Sounds like a job for animal control anyway.” He sighed. “Which, of course, is me.”
A great crashing and shouting came from deeper in the house, followed by a scream and a gunshot. Harry had his pistol out in no time, and Dolph lifted his rifle, but Otto just considered reaching for the chainsaw and then changed his mind. He’d be just as likely to cut off his own leg as to do any good. Better to just stand behind the people holding guns.
Old man Levitt lifted his head from the carpet, and smiled despite the tears running down his face. “Sounds like the other officer decided to see what I had hidden up in the attic. Guess he found out. That’s where I keep the ladies’ auxiliary. Seemed wrong to keep the men and women together. Heh heh heh.”