9. Freezer Burned
“We should have called the police,” Pastor Inkfist said, and Father Edsel just grunted, driving too fast, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and humming something that sounded sort of Wagnerian, only more bombastic.
The priest stopped humming, said, “The days of worldly authority are at an end, my boy. Listen.” He flicked the radio on and twisted through the channels the old-fashioned way, turning a knob, no “seek” or “scan” to light the way, but even though he turned slowly there was never anything but the hiss of static. “You see? Nothing but empty air. The dead have risen. I don’t truck with that Protestant business about the Rapture, but I believe in the end of days, the revelation of St. John the Divine—”
“Now, I don’t know, I think that was all metaphor,” Daniel said, a bit weakly at first, but gaining strength as he went on, feeling on solid ground. “The Great Beast 666 was a Roman emperor, John was writing about the evils of his own time, not giving us a glimpse of something terrible to come.” He paused. “Plus, of course, he was probably eating the wrong sort of mushrooms. I hear those can give you all sorts of ideas.”
“There’s evil afoot, Inkfist—Hell itself disgorging the dead, demons possessing the corpses, I don’t claim to know all the details, but surely you admit Satan had a hand in this?”
“I guess, I suppose you’d say, as for Satan, I think for myself I’ve always seen the church as more practical, ministering the sick, offering spiritual guidance, sure, but mostly—”
“You doubt the existence of demons?” Edsel’s eyes were fiery. “There’s biblical precedent for this situation exactly. Do you recall when Jesus found men emerging from tombs possessed by a demon, and the demon said his name was Legion? And our Lord cast the devils out of the bodies of the men and into a herd of pigs, and those pigs drowned themselves in the sea of Galilee? We have that very same thing here—demons in the bodies of men!”
“I always took the story of Jesus facing Legion to be a parable for the anti-Roman resistance of the time,” Daniel said. “That would explain the inconsistency in the way various apostles—”
“We must be warriors for Christ,” Edsel interrupted. “Armed with our faith, but also armed with shotguns and baseball bats and flamethrowers, if we can get them.”
“Ah. But we can’t, of course.”
“Nonsense,” Edsel said. “Of course we can. And I know just the place. But first, we need to gather the people of the town, and tell them what’s happened. The sooner the better, before we’re overrun by the dead.”
“How do you propose we notify everyone? Go door to door?”
Edsel glanced away from the snow-spattered road to give Daniel a look of complete contempt. “Are you serious? Go forth and harness the mighty power of the Lutheran organization, man. Call up the Women’s Circle and get them to unleash the awful majesty of their phone trees!”
“I was thinking to myself, in a horror movie, the black guy always dies first,” Stevie Ray said. Otto and Rufus and Harry were all jammed in the hallway, with Stevie Ray looking down on them from the attic opening in the ceiling. Dolph and his rifle were out in the living room watching over old man Levitt. “So I was thinking, Not me, and I had my gun out. Still scared the crap just about right out of me when the girl-zombie started moving. She’s wrapped up in about fifteen layers of heavy-duty plastic, though, so she was mostly just rolling a little bit. I probably could’ve saved the bullet, but I put one in her head anyway. Couple other girls up here in plastic, too, but they look like they’re pretty much just bones, so they’re not moving.”
“Good to know,” Harry said.
Rufus coughed. “The black guy doesn’t always die first in horror movies.”
Otto rolled his eyes, but he figured Rufus felt compelled to weigh in, as this was an area in which he had some expertise.
“In the original Night of the Living Dead movie, a black guy’s even the hero.”
“Does he make it out alive in the end?” Stevie Ray asked.
“Well. No.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Back to the matter at hand.” Harry sniffed. “I thought most serial killers liked just one kind of victim. You know, they like to specialize.”
Stevie Ray grunted. “I figure old man Levitt decided he needed to kill a couple of girls now and then just to convince himself he wasn’t a homosexual. You know how it is for people of his generation. They have a hard time admitting things like that about themselves.”
“Yup,” Harry said. “I could see how you may be right.”
As always when the subject came up, Otto wondered in a rush of worry if maybe he wasn’t secretly gay. He’d never been attracted to men, really, but what did that prove? He wasn’t attracted to most women, either. Then Stevie Ray said, “Shit, something else is moving up here,” and a moment later he shouted, “Good GOD it’s a zombie raccoon, look out below!” and Otto was thankful to have something else to worry about for a couple of minutes.
Dolph wanted to go by Eileen’s house and make sure she was okay, that she hadn’t fallen victim to a rampaging zombie min-pin or anything else, but was afraid it would look suspicious, so he’d better wait until nightfall, when he’d be less likely to attract notice. The thing about a town as small as Lake Woebegotten was that everybody knew your business, no matter how much you might wish it was otherwise. Still, they’d been discreet, and as far as anybody else knew, Eileen was just one of his customers, nothing special to him, and it was important to maintain the fiction.
Unless, of course, Harry was wrong, and the zombie apocalypse really was going to forever change the very basic structure of life and society, in which case, all the old rules about infidelity might just cease to apply. Probably the few remaining survivors would need to get started repopulating the Earth. Possibly Dolph would have to inseminate a great many women in order to do his part to restore the species to ascendancy. Now wasn’t that a pretty thought?
The zombie in the bed of his truck thumped, which was nerve-wracking. They’d weighed the thing down with chains and thrown a tarp over it, and it didn’t have any arms or legs, but Dolph could imagine it wriggling its way toward the cab of the truck, silently sliding open the window with its teeth, and sinking fangs into his neck…
Dolph shuddered and stepped on the gas a bit, though he was following Harry and Stevie Ray’s squad car, so he couldn’t go any faster than they were. They finally reached the police station, which was really just a wing of the town hall, though it did have a jail cell, and Dolph watched as Stevie Ray frog-marched Mr. Levitt in through the side door. Harry came over, as did Otto and Rufus, to peer into the bed of the truck where the zombie struggled. “What do we do with him?” Dolph said.
“You got that big walk-in freezer, right?” Harry said. “You mind tucking him in there until tonight’s meeting?”
Dolph stared at him. “You want me to put an undead monster in my store?”
“Just for a few hours.” Harry’s face was totally bland and vaguely pleasant, and Dolph’s outrage melted under his calm gaze. “It’s just I’m going to be a little busy trying to contact the county sheriff and the state police and booking a multiple murderer and trying to organize a town meeting, so I’m stretched a little thin. You don’t mind helping out?”
“Of course not,” Dolph said, and muttered something about civic duty that made Harry slap him on the shoulder and say “Good man!” Some people at the last town meeting had been agitating to fire Harry and disband the local police department, like a lot of little towns all over the country were doing—you could subcontract out to the county sheriff for less than the cost of Harry’s salary and whatever they paid Stevie Ray, but enough people liked having the personal touch and the familiar face in the town cruiser, and nobody much liked the idea of outsiders coming in and sniffing around the town’s crimes. Much better to have Harry there, who’d known everybody for years and could be counted on for a certain level of discretion, even if he could get a little too liberal with the traffic tickets as the end of the fiscal year loomed.
“We can help you with him,” Rufus offered, and Otto looked at his nephew sharply. Otto was a lazy son of a gun, Dolph mused, and how he managed to make a living selling things to farmers was a mystery—he must have quite a store of dirty jokes in Norwegian, or else people just bought things from him to make him go away. Dolph had never had another customer besides Otto who haggled over the price of a tin of chewing tobacco, and Dolph had quit carrying Otto’s brand in self-defense. His nephew was a little odd—with that wispy sad mustache-fuzz, and was that a tattoo of a spiderweb peeking out of the collar of his coat?—but at least he hadn’t puked when faced with zombies like his uncle had. Given his choice, Dolph would have preferred to have Rufus by his side in a fight over Otto, but thought he might ultimately be better off facing whatever came at him alone.
“No, I need the pair of you to come in and give Stevie Ray your statement about what you saw at Mr. Levitt’s house,” Harry said. “We’ll have you come in later, Dolph. I have to get the state police on the horn, see if they can send a crime scene tech…”
Rufus shook his head. “Good luck. I bet the state police are pretty busy trying to stop St. Paul from being eaten by the living dead. You didn’t see it. It’s bad over there.”
Harry shrugged. “We’ll see. Come on inside. You take care, Dolph.” He grinned. “And don’t leave town.”
Where would I go? Dolph thought. He got back in the truck and drove up around the town square to his store, parking in the loading zone around back. After checking to make sure the zombie was secure, he went in through the back door and called, “Clem! Clem, I need your help unloading something.”
Clem the boy wonder didn’t answer, so Dolph went into the front of the store and found him slumped on the stool behind the register with his face on the counter, drool puddling by his cheek. Dolph smacked him on the back of the head, and Clem groaned and lifted his head like it was full of concrete. His eyes were glassy and his skin was pale, and though neither was a difference in kind from his usual appearance, there was definitely a difference of degree, and he was pale and glassy enough that Dolph said, “Are you all right, son?”
Clem looked up at him and said, “Dun fill suh gud,” voice all mushy and sleepy.
Dolph put the back of his hand against Clem’s forehead, and it was hot as a woodstove. “Did you clean out that bite on your leg like I told you?”
“Uhhhh… Uh fuhgoht.”
“Let me see it.” Dolph came around the counter, and Clem obligingly lifted his pants leg and revealed several ugly red holes in his ankle and calf, most oozing blood mixed with something repulsively yellow-green. “That doesn’t look too good,” Dolph said, and then Clem’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell off the stool and hit his head on the edge of the counter and landed in a big ugly mess with his bony butt sticking up in the air.
“Clem!” Dolph rolled him over and slapped his face a couple of times and peeled back his eyelids, though he wasn’t sure why he did that part, it was just something you saw people do on TV when somebody threw a faint, and in any event it didn’t appear to help much. He could call 911 but they were probably swamped with calls, so he went to the phone book and looked up Doctor Holliday’s number. He’d probably get here faster, and besides he knew Clem, so if the boy woke up and started answering questions but didn’t know who the president was or how much four plus four amounted to, Doctor Holliday would know that was just Clem’s normal baseline level of intelligence, not evidence of head trauma.
Dolph dialed, and the line rang and rang and rang without answer, and he was about to hang up when Clem rose from behind the counter, and Dolph just dropped the phone instead, because Clem’s head was canted at a funny angle, and now that he was standing up it was obvious his neck was broken, must’ve landed wrong when he fell, and wasn’t that just the luck? Not bad enough to get infected from a zombie dog bite, he had to go and die, and right in the store, too, which would probably play heck with Dolph’s insurance.
Clem was still drooling, which he didn’t usually do except when sleeping or staring really hard at a packing list, and his eyes were still rolled up, but his mouth was opening and closing ceaselessly as he tried to come for Dolph.
Fortunately death hadn’t made him any smarter, and Clem kept trying to walk right through the counter instead of just walking around it, which meant Dolph had a free minute to…
What? Kill him? Re-kill him? But he was Clem! Dumb as a box of elbow macaroni, sure, but loyal, and sweet-natured, and good tempered, and Dolph had known him since he was just a little kid, and he couldn’t very well pick up a frozen turkey and smack Clem over the head with it, could he? Shooting those zombies at Mr. Levitt’s house had been one thing, they’d been strangers, but even if this wasn’t really Clem anymore, it sure looked like him. Dolph didn’t have his gun now, either, it was still in the truck, and that also made it more difficult, because looking at somebody over the barrel of a rifle had a way of creating some distance between you, the way bludgeoning somebody to death with the contents of a small-town grocery store did not.
So it would have to be containment, then. Dolph danced over toward the back of the store, waving his arms to keep zombie-Clem’s eyes on him, not that Clem appeared to be using his only-showing-whites eyes, and for that matter one of the zombies at Mr. Levitt’s house didn’t have any eyes at all, so how did they get around anyway? Maybe they could smell people, or sense them somehow. Clem eventually figured out how to walk out from behind the register and came lurching down the aisle, knocking into a nice endcap display of pie fillings and sending cans of pumpkin puree and cherries in heavy syrup spilling and rolling every which way. Dolph stayed just out of Clem’s reach, backing up carefully toward the rear of the store, knowing that if he lost his balance and tumbled Clem would fall upon him and snap those teeth—and what horrible teeth, the boy never did get the hang of brushing regularly, let alone flossing—and take a big old bite out of whatever part of Dolph’s anatomy presented itself.
Dolph got the freezer door open a moment before Clem lurched into the storeroom, and then Dolph did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he just stood there in front of the open freezer until Clem was almost within grasping distance.
He sprang off to the left, nipped quickly around behind Clem, put both hands on the zombie’s back, and shoved him into the freezer as hard as he could. Clem stumbled but didn’t fall, and Dolph slammed the freezer door just as the zombie was trying to emerge. The door had a latch on the inside—about fifteen years ago one employee, smarter than Clem but only by a whisker, had gotten herself locked inside for hours, so Dolph had a handle put inside—and maybe Clem was too dumb to use it now, but to be safe Dolph dragged a bunch of heavy boxes of pop and soup and such over in front of the door, making a nice solid wall.
He sagged against the door, panting hard, and then remembered the limbless zombie in the truck, the one he was originally supposed to put in the freezer, and he said a profanity so obscene it might have even made Eileen blush, if she’d heard it.