13. A Fair Cop
Gunther Montcrief staggered out of the Backtrack Bar, home of the nightly “It Could Be Worse, All Things Considered, Hour,” where he’d been consuming well whiskey for the better part of the morning, until the owner Ace told him if he fell off the stool one more time, he was done. Gunther didn’t fall off the stool again, but he did mistake the storage room for the restroom and urinate all over a keg of Krepusky’s Red Ribbon Beer, winner of the coveted second prize at four of the past eighteen central Minnesota Beer Festivals. Ace had tossed him out right quick after that, and it was only when the icy December afternoon breeze tickled his pubic hair that Gunther realized he’d not zipped himself up properly, and his willy was hanging out no doubt turning blue with the cold. Frostbite of the manhood. Made him think again of his father’s friend Johnny who’d frozen to death peeing, and that made him think of the decapitated-but-still-gnawing fish, and that, damn it, was exactly what he’d been drinking to forget.
He looked up from his futile attempt to operate his zipper and saw the town cops Harry and Stevie Ray come barreling down the street toward him holding guns that belonged in a science fiction movie and he probably would’ve peed himself again if he hadn’t just emptied himself out. They were coming to arrest him for indecent exposure and, who knew, maybe for illegally adulterating alcohol, since peeing all over a keg probably counted as watering beer, but they just went right past him and to the door of the Mathison Brothers Funeral Home, conveniently located right across the street from the Backtrack Bar, so those who found grief a little too much for them could stumble across the street and take refuge in a nice deep highball glass. That’s how Gunther had started out drinking so much, as a way to cope with loss, though in recent years the drinking had become heavy enough that he now drank to cope with the fact that he drank too much, a process that was beautiful in its closed-circuit simplicity.
Stevie Ray (who’d cut off Gunther more than once in his capacity as night and weekend bartender at the Backtrack Bar, the man had no regard for a fella’s needs) aimed a couple of snap-kicks at the funeral home door while Gunther watched with swaying fascination, wondering what exactly was going on. The door sagged open and Stevie Ray and Harry went in, crouched low, and Gunther walked over after them to see what was going on. He was vaguely aware that following a pair of armed policemen into a building was not the best idea, but he was old, and curious, and he went wherever he damn well pleased unless a burly bartender physically relocated him elsewhere.
Gunther walked into the funeral home and helped himself to a handful of the free mints they kept on the table there in the foyer for grieving relatives with bad breath. The place was appropriately dark and subdued, with a big faintly-patterned carpet and lots of dark wood furniture and cut-glass vases full of faintly droopy flowers. The funeral home was of the old style, with viewing rooms and offices on the main floor (along with some kind of fancy computery business that sublet a chunk of space), family quarters upstairs (rumor said the area above was divided exactly in half, as the Mathison Brothers hadn’t spoken to one another voluntarily since the early ’90s) and an embalming room in the basement. The thought of dead people under his feet reminded him of those biting fish heads sinking into the water and he shuddered.
Gunther heard the thud of running feet deeper in the building, and then a gunshot so loud it made him jump. The sound was like a switch that turned on his headache, and he groaned as another shot followed, and another. Stevie Ray appeared in one of the viewing room doorways, but backwards, walking in reverse with a gun held out before him, saying “Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ” over and over. Gunther almost hailed him, but deep in his brain he realized that making sudden moves or noises might well result in a startled peace officer/bartender turning a gun on him, so instead he started backing up himself, into a corner by the doorway.
Stevie Ray cleared the door, followed shortly by Harry, who also had his back turned, and a pair of bloody men shambled out. It was the Mathison Brothers, one in a long black plastic apron, the other in his black undertaker’s suit, but otherwise identical right down to their piggy little eyes and swept-back gray hair and, now, their incessantly opening-and-closing blood-streaked mouths.
“Well dip me in manure and call me a chocolate caramel,” Gunther said. “It’s not just the fish.”
“Who the heck?” Stevie Ray said, starting to turn, but Harry yelled, “If it’s talking a bunch of nonsense, it’s not a zombie, so eyes front, soldier! Fire at will!”
Stevie Ray shot Matthew, the brother on the left, and his head pretty much disappeared, replaced by a reddish mist, though bits of bone and brain pattered off the wall, and, more disturbingly, off his own brother. The now-headless body fell straight to the floor like a dropped sail. Gunther spoke, quite conversationally, saying, “Harry said to fire at Will, but you shot Matthew instead. Can’t you tell them apart? Will’s the one in the plastic apron.”
Harry lifted his spaceman gun to his shoulder, sighted on Will Mathison, and pulled his own trigger. He didn’t hit Will quite as square-on, so only half of the head disintegrated, leaving the other half standing alone, like the last bit of a wall in a bombed-out building, but apparently half a head was just as useless as none, because that body fell, too. Harry looked behind him now, sighed, and said, “Gunther, get out of here, this is a crime scene.”
“They’re just like the fish, aren’t they?” Gunther said. There was a word for the dead who came back to life. What was it? “Zomboes,” he said assertively. “They’re zomboes.”
Harry appeared to mull that over, shook his head, and turned to Stevie Ray. “We got the two naked corpses, that must have been the original dead ones waiting to get worked on, and the WoBoCo kid, and now the Mathison Brothers—that’s all of them, right?”
“I knew there were two bodies here for sure,” Stevie Ray said, rubbing the side of his bald head, where he had a gash already crusting up with dried blood. “From that accident over on Big Hole Road. But there could be others. Like—”
“What about the ones on ice?” Gunther said, trying to be helpful. “Don’t they keep a bunch of dead bodies down there when the ground’s frozen, to bury in the spring?”
Harry didn’t tell him to go away again, which was nice, but just shook his head. “There’s a statute now, says cemeteries have to allow burial in the winter, too, decided it was cruel to make people wait months to get their loved ones in the ground, so people don’t get put on ice like that as much.”
Gunther shook his head. Everything changed. Well, what could you do?
“Yeah,” Stevie Ray said slowly, “but the law also says the families have to pay the extra costs for winter burial, like propane heaters to warm up the soil and all that, and a lot of people are pretty frugal, so we might want to check down in the funeral home’s cooler, just in case somebody decided Uncle Ole or Aunt Lena could wait until springtime to get buried on the cheap.”
“All right,” Harry said. “You’re probably right. Let’s go.”
“I’m coming too.”
“Gunther, go home and dry out,” Harry said.
“It was my idea!” Gunther protested. “And you’d send me out there with the zomboes and everything without even a spaceman gun?”
“You’re drunk. And even if you weren’t drunk, you’re a civilian. Go home.”
Gunther grumbled and went for the door, but he didn’t step outside, because it was cold out there, and cold in his fishing shack with the cracks stuffed with old newspaper, and truly the cold bothered him more than the dead headless bodies of the Mathison brothers, since he’d seen his share of bodies back when he was in the service, even if the guns were a lot fancier now. He watched as Harry and Stevie Ray headed through the office toward the stairs that led into the morgue below, and cocked his head for the sound of gunshots, which came along as he’d expected—must have been a couple fellas in the coolers after all, probably pretty annoyed at being laid out in an ice-cold drawer, and he wondered if the cold made the zomboes more sluggish, but no, they were still warm-blooded, and it was cold-blooded things that got sleepy in the cold, except they were probably already embalmed and in embalming didn’t they replace your blood with formaldehyde or something? Judging by the third gunshot, being embalmed didn’t keep you from coming back as a zombo.
Gunther thought that fact must be significant, and he was staring off into the middle distance trying to figure out why that fact tickled his brain when Stevie Ray came running out of the office, wild-eyed, no longer holding his gun, front of his beige uniform shirt all covered in blood. He stumbled to the table and grabbed onto it as if to steady himself, and since feeling unstable on your feet was something Gunther could sympathize with, he said, “You all right?”
“No,” Stevie Ray said, and puked.
Harry led the way into the morgue, where Will Mathison had probably been working on embalming a body when the body sat up and took a bite out of him. The room was all tan-colored tile, with big metal sinks and metal tables and weird hoses and cupboards and harsh bright lights overhead. Harry’d been down here before, of course, but it never failed to give him a shiver. For one thing it was cold. For another, it looked like the setting from one of his survival horror games, the kind where you crept around the hallways of an abandoned mental hospital with nothing but a rusty pipe for a weapon and the loudest noise on the soundtrack was your avatar’s own ragged breath. And now there really were zombies.
At least I’ve logged all those hours playing zombie-killing games, he thought, though he knew it didn’t really work that way. Still, while spending time on a firing range was probably nothing like actually shooting a person, people said the practice made the actual act easier, more automatic, so he hoped maybe some similar principle would apply here.
The morgue cooler was a big, shiny, four-drawer affair bolted to one of the walls. “All right, Stevie Ray. You want to open, or you want to shoot?”
“Shoot,” he said without hesitation.
Harry considered challenging him to rock-paper-scissors, but what did it matter? His shoulder hurt from the recoil on that automatic shotgun anyway. “All right, but use your pistol, that shotgun makes too big a splash.” He went to the first drawer, opened the door, and pulled out the sliding tray, looking at the cold blue feet wiggling and twisting. As soon as the zombie—Lord, it was Missy Hohlt, the first one would have to be someone he knew, and her so young, but she’d always had those seizures, she was bound to hit a big one eventually—saw the light or smelled the air or who knows what, it started twisting and trying to sit up, and Stevie Ray was there, putting a bullet right into her head, dropping her dead. After a moment’s thought, Harry slid the drawer closed again. Why not?
He opened the next drawer, saw more bluish feet, this one an old man’s he didn’t know, and once again the zombie started to get up, and once again, Stevie Ray made it lie down again.
“This isn’t so bad,” Harry said, opening the next drawer and grinning at Stevie Ray. “I’ve had more trouble killing rats—”
“HARRY!” Stevie Ray shouted, and Harry felt a searing pain on his arm, and looked over to see that, in defiance of all consistency, this corpse had been slid into the drawer feet first, so its head was right there, and in fact its teeth were sunk in Harry’s arm, and now it was reaching for him, and Harry tried to get his pistol but his right arm was in agony and his left was his stupid hand and the zombie had his throat, and Lord, it was strong, an old lady with wispy grey hairs and a face wrinkly like a desert canyon seen from an airplane but a grip like a circus strongman.
The zombie pulled him down, and its jaws unclamped from his arm, and Harry said “Oh thank you sweet Jesus” in the sudden lessening of pain, but then the zombie’s teeth found his neck, and he felt his hot warm life pumping out of him, and he thought, No save point, I lose.
“It jumped up out of the drawer like a flea off a dead dog,” Stevie Ray said, swaying. “We put down the first one, and the second one, too, without much trouble, but the third one reached out and grabbed Harry and pulled him off balance, and Harry started screaming, but he was between me and the body in the drawer so I couldn’t get off a shot, and then Harry fell on the ground and his throat was all red and torn-up and when I tried to help him the zombie in the cooler came at me, knocked my gun away, and I wound up fighting it hand-to-hand, managed to twist it off my hip and smash its head into the big industrial sink, just kept smashing it and smashing it until it was just in pieces, and then this terrible hammering started up, it was a four-drawer cooler and all four drawers must have been full and the last dead body was excited, I guess it heard the commotion, I couldn’t stand the noise, and I—I just ran.” He lifted his gaze to Gunther, and his eyes were as bleak as the sky at the end of the shortest day of winter. “I’ve been a soldier. I’ve killed men in combat. But these things, and seeing what they did to Harry, I just couldn’t, I had to get away…”
“No shame in it,” Gunther said. “We all get to a breaking point if we live long enough. What matters is what you do next.” What Gunther had done next was get stinking drunk and arrange to stay that way for the foreseeable, but no use mentioning that. “But what about—”
Harry, he was going to say, but then Harry came out of the office, dragging one leg, big bite taken out of his throat, face all gray, eyes blank, and he was a zombo, sure enough, killed and come back. Poor guy. He’d always done right by Gunther, just stuck him in a cell if he needed drying out, never gave him an ass-kicking, just a talking-to.
Stevie Ray was in no shape to cope, and he didn’t have his weapon anyway, so Gunther reached into his big old overcoat and took out his pistol, thumbed back the hammer, looked past Stevie Ray’s astonished face, took a two-handed target shooter’s stance, and put one right in the middle of old Harry’s face.
The revolver didn’t make heads disappear like those spaceman guns did, but it appeared to get the job done, because Harry died for the second time.
Stevie Ray looked at his dead boss, then back at Gunther, and said, “You told us you didn’t have a gun!”
“Said I didn’t have a fancy spaceman gun like yours.” Gunther put his pistol away. “Just my lousy old sidearm from when I was in the service. Hadn’t fired it in years.”
“You always carry that thing around?”
“I’m an old man. I live alone. I sometimes black out. Gotta protect myself.”
Stevie Ray stood up from the table and looked down at his dead boss. “Oh, shit, Harry, what am I supposed to do now?”
“Guess this makes you the chief,” Gunther said. He paused. “Want to buy me and you a drink to celebrate your promotion?”