5. Undeathbed
Pastor Inkfist and Father Edsel trudged from the ice-crusted dirt driveway to the sagging front porch of the Mormont farm. The steps were slippery and the boards creaked ominously as Edsel rapped smartly on the front door. After a moment the inner door opened and the doctor appeared, mustache droopy, face long and tired.
“Doctor Holliday,” Edsel said, and Daniel nodded. You never, ever called Doctor Henry Holliday “Doc Holliday,” no matter how tempted you might be—the doctor hated the coincidence of sharing a name with a famous gunfighting gambling tubercular dentist, and had said on more than one occasion that he’d almost gone into the civil service instead of medical school just to avoid the jokes. Now he combated any such attempt at levity by being utterly humorless and dour at all times, which meant maybe civil service would have been a good fit for him, after all.
“Come on in,” the doctor said. “She doesn’t have much longer.” They trooped into the dim foyer and started stripping off their layers of coats and stomping the snow off their boots.
“She still unconscious?” Father Edsel asked. “Deathbed confessions are always the juiciest.”
Daniel grimaced, but Doctor Holliday just shrugged. “We’ve been keeping her pretty full of painkillers. I sent the nurse home. Won’t be much longer now. Cancer’s just about eaten her up.”
“Any of the family here?”
“Daughter was supposed to fly in from Orlando, but she called and said her flight was canceled, some kind of trouble at the airport, all the planes were grounded, I didn’t catch all the details. Bad connection. She didn’t sound too broken up about it though.”
“Let’s give the old girl her send-off, then.” Edsel carried a little black bag into the bedroom/sickroom, and Daniel followed, curious despite himself. He’d never seen Catholic last rites performed—Lutherans sometimes anointed the sick, but they didn’t go around calling it a sacrament or anything.
The widow Mormont was thin as a bundle of sticks, barely taking up any space at all in the narrow hospital bed. Medical devices beeped and booped and flickered mysteriously, and a big crucifix with an intricately carved bleeding Jesus hung on the wall. Daniel, who found even the simple cross of his faith a little creepy when he really thought about it, could never get over the grotesquerie of some Catholic crucifixes. Jesus had suffered, and that was certainly to be remembered, but did you really need a fella with blood all over his feet and side and forehead and wrists looking down at you while you slept?
The three of them stood around the bed, looking at the widow’s lined face in its slack repose. “If you can, you should give your last confession,” Father Edsel said, laying his hand on her shoulder.
Her eyes fluttered open. “Father,” she croaked, then flicked her eyes at Daniel. “And the Pastor, too. You must think I’m some kind of world-class sinner, for both of you to come here.”
“Nice to see you again, Maggie,” Edsel said, glancing at the doctor. “I didn’t expect we’d have a chance to chat.”
“What, old Doctor Holliday told you I wasn’t going to wake up again?” Her voice was gaining strength now. “I was just pretending to be asleep while he was here. He’s depressing. Got the bedside manner of an undertaker. No, I’m awake, and I’ll give my confession, though don’t expect anything too exciting.” She cackled. “I confessed all that stuff a long time ago. Doctor, thanks for keeping the morphine flowing. I can see why my cousin Harold got so addicted to the stuff—he stole his mama’s goat and my tricycle to sell for drugs when I was a girl. Good thing I never discovered this stuff when I was a younger woman, or I might have a lot more to confess. Now shoo.” She flapped her hands weakly. “This last part’s between me and my God and my God’s man on the scene here.”
Daniel nodded and went with the doctor into the kitchen, where they drank old coffee and made awkward small talk. They were both in the business of salvation, but the divide between spiritual and secular salvation respectively was a tricky one to bridge. They settled on talking about memorial services they’d attended and jello salads and hotdishes they’d eaten in the homes of grieving relatives. After a while Father Edsel came in and said, “She’s gone.”
He didn’t add anything about her rising from the dead and trying to take a big bite out of his face, so Daniel figured the reports of zombies were exaggerated.
The doctor nodded, put down his coffee cup, and took a pen from his breast pocket. “Let me just take a look so I can fill in the death certificate, then we’ll call the funeral home.”
“I remember in the old days,” Daniel said, “If someone died in winter like this, they’d keep the body at the funeral home until spring, when the ground at the cemetery was soft enough to dig into again. It was a mess. Somebody would die and you couldn’t have the funeral until four or five months later, made the whole grieving process get dragged out. I know it was hard on a lot of the little cemeteries when they passed that law about allowing winter burials, they had to buy that expensive equipment so they could dig in the frozen dirt like that, but I think it’s better this way.”
“Cremation’s the way to go,” Father Edsel said. “No muss, no fuss, no headstone, nice little urn, maybe one of those metal plates like you see on a trophy with the name and dates, no need to get in the car and take a trip out to the cemetery, you can just lean on the mantelpiece and have a chat with the dearly departed.”
“I thought you folks frowned on cremation.” Lutherans weren’t so hot on the idea themselves, mostly. Heck, most of the Lutherans in Lake Woebegotten wouldn’t even turn on the furnace in their houses until the temperature got down into the teens—any warmer and you could just put on another sweater or bring out another quilt, couldn’t you? Cremation seemed like an overindulgent use of good heat.
Edsel shrugged. “We like to have the body present for the funeral mass, but after that, we don’t fuss if they want to take ‘ashes to ashes’ literally. It’s not like it used to—”
The doctor screamed from the other room, and Edsel ran toward the deathbed. Daniel followed and almost crashed into Edsel, who in the doorway saying, “God, dear God.” He took a hesitant step into the room, and Daniel saw past him.
The widow Mormont was sitting up in bed, grasping the doctor’s head in both hands like a kid holding a basketball and trying to decide whether to pass or shoot, and she looked to be giving him a passionate kiss. She dragged the doctor half-up on the bed, his feet drumming a little on the floorboard—just random drumming, not any sort of beat you’d recognize, or any kind of Morse code message either—making small bubbling moaning noises, except suddenly they stopped.
Widow Mormont looked up at them, her face smeared with blood, something that looked suspiciously like a nose gripped in her teeth, which she chewed and swallowed. Her eyes were foggy and unfocused but it sure seemed like she could see them, all right.
The widow was a zombie. Not any kind of metaphorical zombie, or philosophical zombie, or anything else but a plain old reanimated flesh-eater like you saw in the movies, if you watched those kind of movies, which of course Daniel didn’t.
She dropped Doctor Holliday, who slid to the floor—his throat was pretty much gone, as well as his nose, a bit of cheek, and both eyes. The widow started to climb out of the bed, but her legs were bound up in the sheet, and getting herself loose was apparently beyond her. She tore wildly at the hospital corners, but they were tucked in tight. She bent herself forward completely double and started tearing at the sheet and blanket holding her legs with her teeth. Her gown had slipped down, revealing one withered breast, and Daniel averted his eyes, even though taking your eyes off a flesh-eating predator was probably a bad idea. He couldn’t help it. The whole situation was too undignified. Daniel finally found his voice, and used it to scream, “Do something!”
“Good idea,” Father Edsel said, and left the room.
Daniel stared at his departing back, wondering if he should follow, if the priest was about to drive off and abandon him, but they couldn’t just leave the widow here, not when she was like this, what would people think?
Before he could commit to any particular course of action, Edsel returned carrying a shotgun. “Where did you get that?” Daniel said, but Edsel ignored the question—probably, Daniel had to admit, because it wasn’t all that pertinent—and pointed the gun at the widow. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he said, and pulled both triggers.
The boom was huge, and Daniel jumped even though he’d known it was coming. The widow’s head and shoulders pretty much disappeared in a sort of red haze, though considerable chunks of gray and red and white sprayed all over the wall and stuck there. “Or if you can’t get behind me, at least get spattered all over the wallpaper,” Edsel said.
Daniel started to vomit, as discreetly as he could, but Edsel still noticed, and said, “Oh, good, it wasn’t messy enough in here, we needed you to contribute some bodily fluids, very good.” He came over and clapped his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “It’s all right. I can see you’ve never wrestled with demons before. It takes some getting used to.”
“You—you shot her!”
“I shot it, Pastor. That’s just a monster. The widow’s soul was sent to her heavenly home with full honors, and that body there is just a sort of demon-haunted house. Granted, the headless zombie corpse makes the funeral mass a bit tricky, but we’ll manage. You want to do the doctor?” He cracked open the gun and loaded two fresh shells into it.
“Do the—what?” Daniel wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He shouldn’t have eaten that tuna noodle hotdish for lunch. It smelled pretty awful coming back out of his stomach like that.
“Doctor Holliday. He’s dead.” Edsel was using a patient Sunday School sort of voice. “Which means, in a minute, he’s going to come back to life and try to eat us.”
“You can’t know that. Just because the widow came back—”
“I told you, I heard it on the radio. This is happening all over.”
“Just because some crackpot talk show host says there are zombies doesn’t mean it’s true—”
“I never said it was a crackpot talk show host,” Edsel said, still patiently. “I was listening to National Public Radio, and the BBC World Service, and I switched around to a couple of other news stations, and they had a lot of conflicting stories, but whenever they had a clip of somebody who’d actually been on the scene talking, they said the same thing: dead people got up and tried to make living people dead too.”
“Oh,” Daniel said weakly. “But the doctor, he can’t…”
“He is,” Edsel said, and thrust the shotgun into Daniel’s hands. “Funny, the original Doc Holliday died in bed, even though everybody thought he’d die in a gunfight. And this Doc Holliday probably expected to die in bed, and, well…” He shrugged. “We’ll see how that turns out.”
“The doctor did die in bed.” Daniel stared as the doctor’s corpse began to stir, moving less like a person and more like some kind of meatskin full of rodents or bugs, all strange ripples and convulsions and twitches. “Like you said, this thing, it’s just…” Could he say it? His sermons were about honoring your father and mother and the parable of the talents and turning the other cheek and the prodigal son and the Sermon on the Mount, not about devils and hellfire and damnation, but… “It’s just a demon.”
Doctor Holliday’s body stood up, awkwardly, and though it had no eyes or nose it seemed to sense their presence anyway, and began to lurch toward them, arms outstretched, mouth moving as if chewing its way through the air.
Daniel closed his eyes and fired the gun.