2. Zombie Walk
Ingvar Knudsen and Otto Tofte were sipping coffee at the counter in Cafe Lo (the sign out front read Cafe Loquacious, but if you went ahead and said all that you were just putting on airs, and might as well go around wearing Italian leather shoes and driving a red convertible car and thinking you were better than everybody else). They were both looking up at the new flat-screen TV above the counter, which was a controversial addition to the diner. There was a television mounted on the wall in Backtrack Bar where you could watch Twins games and the like, and that seemed right and proper, and even if it was an old screen that gave an orange tint to everything, well who cared, baseball was still baseball even if the ball was orange. Baseball belonged in a bar just as much as beer and whiskey and pickled eggs and holding your nose when you went into the bathroom. But at a diner it seemed like you ought to be alone with your thoughts along with your coffee and maybe a newspaper spread out on the counter, so there was a bit of grumbling when the owner’s granddaughter Julie Olafson put in a new shiny flat-screen TV when she moved back home after years away and took over after the old man had a stroke, poor fella, and him so hale and hearty up until then. Julie compromised by keeping the sound turned down, but the picture on, and just now the TV was showing a shaky handheld camera view of lurching bloody men and women staggering slowly down a city street, arms outstretched. One passed close by the camera and he had one eye hanging out of his head like a yo-yo at the end of a string.
Otto grunted. “What’s all that then.”
“That’s something,” Ingvar said. “Could be for Hallowe’en, you think.”
“Could be,” Otto allowed. “Closer to Christmas now, though.”
“You bet.”
“What it is, I bet,” Otto said. “Is one of those zombie walks.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah.”
Ingvar looked into his coffee cup for a long time. “What’s that all about then?”
“My nephew Rufus, you know Glenda’s boy?”
“Used to play first base for the Martens at the high school, had a good arm. Got himself a scholarship, that right?”
“Up to a college in the cities,” Otto said. “Fell in with a wrong crowd. Got a tattoo of a spiderweb on his neck.”
Ingvar grunted. “Not something you see every day.”
“Broke his mother’s heart. He did one of those zombie walks. Everybody dresses up like they’re dead, with make-up and all, and go in a big crowd down the street, talking about brains and such. Like a parade.”
“So that’s fun then. Never see something like that in a parade here.”
“I guess,” Otto said. “Except for the Pretty Good Brotherhood of Cnut. They lurch along pretty slow in the fourth of July parade.”
“They have those swords though. And the Viking helmets with the horns.”
“They say it takes all kinds, but I don’t know.” Otto took a sip of coffee and glanced back at the screen. The zombies were gone, and a couple of shiny-haired newspeople were talking with serious looks on their faces, and there was some kind of text crawling across the bottom of the screen, but Otto couldn’t make it out because he’d left his glasses in the truck. He was only forty-two and never needed glasses before and while he’d let Barbara convince him to wear them for driving after he nearly ran down the Munck boy he wasn’t about to go around in public, not with those frames Barbara picked out. They were blue and kinda square-looking. Who did she think he was, some kind of rock and roll star?
The screen switched to some kind of star map and Otto figured they were talking about the big meteor shower last night. The sky lit up enough to wake him but not Barbara, who could probably sleep through the end times and the Rapture and a four-piece swing band set up right in her nightstand, because who could hear anything over her snoring anyway? Otto had gone to the window but by then the big light was gone and it was just a bunch of shooting stars, pretty enough but what it came down to was rocks falling out the sky and that wasn’t much good to anybody so he went back to bed.
Julie came in from the back and topped up their coffee. She was a pretty girl in her early thirties with ice-blue eyes and an aggressive chest that she pointed at you to make you tip more than was healthy or necessary, and Otto tried not to notice how tight her waitress uniform was, though he half-thought it was on purpose. “Heard on the radio this morning about some kind of riot in the Cities,” she said.
“Ish,” Ingvar said. He was seventy and looked a hundred, and even though he wore patched bib overalls everybody knew he was sitting pretty, having turned his already-successful family farm into an even more lucrative sand and gravel quarry. Otto didn’t think it was right shipping off so much of the town’s land, since land wasn’t something you could get back, but Ingvar’d bought a new scoreboard for the high school baseball team so you couldn’t say he wasn’t generous, though he could’ve tried a little harder to be anonymous about it. Just asking for the gift to be anonymous wasn’t enough. Word got around. Made people uncomfortable to be around him, since you were afraid he might be afraid you might ask him for money, as if you would, that’d be the day.
“Everybody’s always upset about something.” Otto sipped the coffee, which wasn’t as good as in the days when Julie’s grandfather did the brewing, but it was hot, and since winter was just getting underway hot was the important thing. “Probably too many people trying to get a talking muppet doll for their kids, that kind of thing, people forget the true meaning of the holidays.”
“It’ll blow over soon, whatever it is,” Julie said. “Too cold to be out on the street making a fuss anyway.”
“Yep.” Ingvar hunched a little more over his coffee as if to warm himself, probably thinking of that big, cold, empty farmhouse of his out on the edge of the prairie, his children moved away, wife dead these fifteen years, and all his farmland transformed into pretty much a great big hole in the ground where there used to be gravel and where there was, now, just empty space and some iced-up black water. Otto was a farm equipment salesman, not a farmer himself, but he knew it took a special kind of used-up old and tired to turn your back on the land that had sustained your family for generations and let a company come in and rip the land up to spread on driveways and road projects. Ingvar might have gotten a little richer out of the deal but Otto wondered what he did with himself all day now.
The bell over the door jingled, and Otto hunched instinctively against the blast of winter cold that came bursting into the diner. He wasn’t about to spin around on his stool to see who’d come in, but the look on Julie’s face was enough to make him twist a little and glance back, casually, as if just checking to see what the weather was doing.
His nephew Rufus stood in the doorway, winter coat unzipped and spilling feathers from a long tear in the sleeve, shirt torn half off, hair and eyes wild. Nobody said anything, until finally Julie said, “Get you something?”
“I can’t believe you’re just sitting here,” Rufus said in that tone he had, the one that broke his poor mother’s heart, like everybody around him was dumb as a bunch of chickens and he couldn’t bear their company. “Haven’t you—haven’t you watched the news?”
“Heard there was a commotion in the cities,” Otto said. “Some kinda riot.” He paused. “You get caught up in that?”
Rufus laughed, shook his head, and took a stool on the other side of Ingvar, who was still contemplating his coffee. “You mean you don’t know? I guess the media’s trying to cover it up, or else they don’t believe it…” He shook his head. “I drove here as fast as I could once I got away, to make sure you and mom and everybody was okay, but I should have known, in this town, who would even notice if the dead started walking? You saw a zombie you’d probably just ask him what kind of gas mileage he got in his hearse.”
Ingvar turned his head slowly to Rufus. “Zombies, huh? Your uncle was telling us about them. People dress up funny and act dead.”
“I’m talking about people who are dead acting like they’re alive,” Rufus said. “My girl—” He shot a glance at Otto. “A friend of mine, she’s a junior, studying social work, she’s been volunteering at the hospital in the hospice unit, and she told me it started down in the morgues, the—you know, the cadavers—they started getting up off the tables and…” He shook his head. “Attacking people. Killing people. And then the people they killed got up and started killing other people. My friend went into the hospital first thing this morning and said it was all screaming and craziness, and she saw a man she knew, who’d died of cancer just the day before, come running down the hallway as fast as a dog chasing a car. Tried to take a bite out of her, but he didn’t have any teeth.” Rufus covered his eyes and started laughing. “A zombie with no teeth, can you believe that? Like he might gum you to death? So she ran away and there were police running around and shooting and yelling and…”
He uncovered his eyes. “So she came to see me. Campus was normal, no dead people, I guess the skeletons in biology lab don’t count, maybe you have to have some muscles left to get up again, I don’t know. I told her I’d bring her here, where it was safe, but we had to stop for gas right off the interstate, and she went to pee, and she didn’t come back, and when I went looking for her there was blood coming out from under the bathroom door and something inside that sounded like chewing. I thought maybe I could save her, so I pulled the door open, and there was a mechanic in greasy overalls with a big dent in his head and blood all over him and Winnie, she—my friend—she was trying to stand up on a leg that looked like a shark took a bite out of it and her eyes were all glassy and they were both reaching for me.” He plucked at his coat. “Almost got me. But I made it to my car, and drove here as fast as I could, and…” Another laugh. “You’re just sitting here drinking coffee. The dead have risen from their graves to kill the living, just like in the movies, and you’re just sitting here drinking coffee.”
“Well,” Ingvar said after a moment’s contemplation. “That sure is different. A guy could get pretty worked up about something like that.”