6. The Tell-Tale Parts
Otto offered his nephew Rufus a ride home from the diner because the boy’s engine was running ragged and the brakes were mushy and it was burning oil, and it was a foreign car besides, which only served to compound the shame of such poor maintenance, but that was college kids for you, and what did you expect from a boy who’d get a spiderweb tattooed on his neck? Rufus rode sullen in the passenger seat of Otto’s pickup, fiddling with the radio a little, but not picking up much of anything except static. “I hope your radio’s busted,” Rufus said, twisting the knob to off. “Otherwise it means the entire communications infrastructure is collapsing under an onslaught of the undead.”
“Must be one or the other,” Otto said.
Rufus grunted and started poking at one of those cell phones that looked like an oversize throat lozenge, all plasticky-shiny and rounded corners, didn’t even flip open. “Can’t get any service out here.”
Otto didn’t figure that deserved any response. Cell phones worked in Lake Woebegotten, after a fashion, but there were more dead zones than live ones. He’d heard you got the best reception if you went all the way to the top of the Borg Co-Op Grain Elevator, where they had the town’s highest flagpole but only flew the flag on national (and some Norwegian and German) holidays because it was such a pain to get up there, but if you were going to that kind of trouble to make a phone call, you might as well drive over and say your piece in person, and if you wanted to talk to someone who lived far away, why not just send a letter?
“Have to stop at the store.” Otto pulled into one of the diagonal spaces in front of Dolph’s Half Good Grocery and Rufus heaved a sigh and climbed out after him. Otto paused to look at the red plastic handbasket sitting upside down on the sidewalk with a frozen turkey on top of it, shuddering a little, then shrugged and walked on into the store.
Dolph, a big bluff man with the look of an ex-football player (though Otto knew he’d never played, owing to a peculiar spinal cord condition that made him fall unconscious if he tilted his head all the way back), was in the process of yelling at Clem, latest in a long line of pig farmers who found themselves perennially outsmarted by their livestock. (No shame in that. Pigs are smart, smarter than most dogs, though their table manners aren’t as good, maybe even smarter than goats, though not as fiendishly clever.) “What do you mean you didn’t call old man Levitt? That dog’s about to chew through the plastic!”
“Uh. Forgot.” Clem stood behind the checkstand, and he didn’t look so good, sweat pouring down his face and plastering his bowl-cut brown hair to his forehead, eyes deeply shadowed. “Sorry.”
“Want something done,” Dolph grumbled, and reached over to pick up the phone. Otto went to the freezer section, because if he forgot to pick up the milk again, Barbara wouldn’t even say anything, she’d just fix him with that stare of hers, and sigh, and put on her coat, and make a special trip out to the store herself. Rufus looked morosely in at the beer, which was mostly Bud or, if you were feeling fancy, Michelob. Probably got used to drinking things with fruit juice and little paper umbrellas up at college.
Otto went to the check stand, and Dolph hung up the phone, frowning. “Something bad’s happening at old man Levitt’s place,” Dolph said. “I called to tell him to pick up his dog, and he sounded all concerned at first, and then there was this crashing noise, and he started cussing and carrying on and dropped the phone on the floor. All kinds of yelling going on when I hung up.” He looked at Clem, nodded to himself sort of decisive-like, and said, “Clem, mind the store, I’m going to run over to his house and see if everything’s all right. He’s an old fella, might have broken a hip.”
“We’ll go with you,” Otto said. Old man Levitt had been the principal over at the combined high school before becoming superintendent, and he’d looked the other way when Otto’s son was caught smoking wacky tobacco out behind the gym, so Otto figured he owed him.
“Are you serious?” Rufus said.
“Are you in a big hurry to get home and see your mother?” Otto said.
“Right,” Rufus said. “We’d better go check on him. It’s the neighborly thing to do.”
“I’m telling you, that dog is a zombie,” Rufus said, and Otto nodded, again.
“You’re telling me, and you’ve told me, three times already.” The dog was in the back of the truck in a cooler, trying hard to get out. “So I guess everything’s a zombie now. I’d better watch out before the frozen turkey I got for Christmas dinner starts flapping around the kitchen, dripping everywhere.”
“I think they need a head to reanimate.” Rufus had his thinking-hard expression on, which always made him look like he was working out an impacted bowel movement. “It seems to me we’re dealing with the classic George Romero Night of the Living Dead sort of zombies, just straight-up reanimated corpses hungry for human flesh, probably brought to life by some kind of cosmic radiation. You heard about the meteor shower last night, right? Who knows what came flying down from space? We’re obviously not dealing with a Serpent and the Rainbow style Haitian zombie, those are just living people who get drugged and mindfucked—”
“Language,” Otto said, though he spent most of his time with unmarried agrarian Norwegians, who cursed worse than that, if not always in English.
“Brainwashed, then. Those are the true zombies, the ones we get the word from—‘zombi’ was originally another name for the snake god Iwa Damballah Wedo—but vodoun zombies don’t attack people or eat flesh or brains, they mostly just toil in the sugar cane fields, you know? This is too large-scale to be something like that anyway. And we’re lucky because, based on what I’ve seen, these guys are slow shamblers, so we’re not talking about the modern zombie apocalypse you mostly see in movies these days, where some kind of crazy viral prion pandemic disease turns people into mindless, violent, fast-moving rage zombies. I don’t even think it’s right to call things like that zombies, though, they’re not dead, they don’t even think they’re dead, so—”
He just keeps talking, Otto marveled, and said, “Why do you know so much about this nonsense?” Or about movies about this nonsense, anyway. Nobody depended on direct experience anymore. Everything was secondhand, viewed through a screen lit by electricity instead of sunlight. Not that there were many opportunities for the direct study of things like zombies, but the point still stood. Kids today spent too much time inside their own heads, or spewing out the contents of their heads all over the internet, instead of going out in the world and getting things done.
“I took an American Studies pop culture class this past semester,” Rufus said, “called ‘The Zombie as Metaphor.’”
“So that’s what they call a liberal arts education then. Sounds about right.” Otto tapped the brakes. “There’s the Levitt place.” He pulled in behind Dolph’s pickup and climbed out in time to see Dolph unlocking the toolbox mounted behind the cab. He removed a deer rifle and checked to see if it was loaded.
“See you got a gun there,” Otto said.
“Seemed like the thing to do,” Dolph said.
“Aim for the head.” Rufus climbed out, holding a tire tool in his hand.
Otto sighed. “We have a flat tire I didn’t know about?”
“I’d rather have an assault shotgun, but—”
They heard the unmistakable sound of a chainsaw being started up inside the house, exchanged the sort of looks that carry a great deal of information—mostly information about bewilderment, worry, and curiosity about the make, model, and merits of the particular chainsaw that was being used in there—and then they all headed for the side door (the front door was for Bible salesmen and visits from the military telling you a family member had been killed by friendly fire and the like). Otto wished he’d thought to pick up a jack handle or something from the pickup, keenly aware that the closest thing he had to a weapon was his multi-tool, and the knife blades on that were sufficient for cutting the strapping tape off a pallet of fertilizer but not much else. Not that he expected to find zombies in there, but something was going on. There was no good reason to run a chainsaw inside your house except if a tree fell through your roof, and there was no sign of such arboreal invasion here.
Dolph actually knocked on the door, though the noise of a chainsaw cutting into something inside made it impossible to hear, so he knocked a little harder, then shrugged and tried the doorknob. Most people didn’t bother to lock their doors in Lake Woebegotten when they were home, but Mr. Levitt was an exception.
“This is ridiculous.” Rufus shouldered Dolph aside, jammed the flattened end of the tire iron between the door and the frame, leaned all his scrawny college-boy weight into it, and popped the door open.
In the cozily-furnished living room, old man Levitt was chainsawing a zombie in the neck while kicking another zombie in the face. He was wearing pajamas and worn green slippers—Mr. Levitt that is, not the zombies, which were dressed in filthy rags and tatters—and he was laughing, not hysterically but like he’d just heard a real gut-buster of a joke, as another three or four zombies shambled in from what was probably the kitchen. Levitt glanced over his shoulder, noticed the newcomers, stopped laughing, then knelt down and commenced decapitating the zombie he’d kicked in the face. Otto stood in the doorway staring, feeling like most of his brain was still back in the truck a few miles down the road—it certainly wasn’t here, where ridiculous things were happening. These couldn’t be zombies. Except they couldn’t be anything else. They had skull bone showing through flaps of gray skin, and bones poking out of decomposed skin, and they were grayish, and they shambled, and there were three more coming out of the kitchen, kind of slow, mostly because they were all trying to pass through the narrow doorway at once and were getting tangled up in each other.
Despite being understandably a little distracted, Otto did notice that Mr. Levitt was chopping off the zombie’s head with a Craftsman 18-inch electric chainsaw, about a fourteen-, maybe fifteen-pounder, looked like the four horsepower kind with the tool-less chain tensioner and the automatic oiler, a damn good tool for an electric saw, though Otto always preferred gas-powered, for one thing you didn’t have to worry about the darn cord, though on the other hand with gas-powered you had to pour in fuel and half the time you poured too much and overflowed a little and went around smelling like gas all day and worrying somebody’d flick a cigarette behind them and accidentally set you on fire, so he supposed it could be argued—
Dolph raised his rifle and shot one of the other zombies in the head—it exploded like a jack o’ lantern kicked by a kid two weeks after Halloween—while Rufus took a deep breath and went in swinging the tire iron at another zombie, raining blows upon its head. The zombie sat down hard like a little kid shoved down by a bigger kid at the playground and looked up at Rufus with an expression that was half ravenous and half Why Me? until Rufus bashed a good-sized hole in its face. That left one zombie still shambling forward unattended. Not wanting to look like he wasn’t trying, Otto took his multi-tool out of his pocket, unfolded the short serrated knife blade, sighed, and hoped the zombie would hold still long enough for Otto to saw its head off, which didn’t seem likely, but wasn’t that always the way.
Fortunately Mr. Levitt finished with his zombie, stepped around the one Rufus was still hammering on, and shoved the chainsaw into the chest of the final zombie, which was the biggest and freshest-looking of the bunch, once a broad-shouldered man with a horribly-scarred face and lank black hair. There wasn’t much blood, and what there was, was more a sort of reddish-brown powder. The zombie grunted and stumbled back, and Levitt kept the saw moving, taking off both its arms just above the elbow, then crouching—he was spry for a fella who had to be pushing eighty—and took off both its legs above the knee. The torso lay on the carpet, head lashing back and forth, mouth opening and closing, stumps wiggling, and Otto stepped over behind the couch and threw up everything he’d eaten at the diner, which was unfortunately chicken and mushroom hotdish, never a meal improved by regurgitation.
Levitt flicked a switch and the chainsaw went silent. What with the gunshot and the yelling—they’d all been yelling, Otto realized, except Levitt, who’d been silent since he stopped laughing—the sudden silence made his ears tingle and everything feel too airless and big.
“What do you think, boys?” Levitt said. “Should we keep this one alive to interrogate? See what he knows?” And he laughed, but this was a wheezy little old man’s haw-haw-haw, not the big belly laughs he’d come out with before.
“I told you there were zombies,” Rufus said, staring down at the mess he’d made of the zombie at his feet.
“Wish somebody’d told me. I would have put a lock on the cellar door. Maybe finally invested in that acid bath I’ve been thinking about all those years.” Levitt sat down on his couch beside his chainsaw, fished around in the drawer of the end table, and came out with a pack of cigarettes. “I only ever smoke after I kill somebody,” he said, as if by way of apology. “I figure this counts. Sure got the same thrill, anyway.”
Rufus lifted his head, frowned, and said, “I knew the dead were rising, but how’d they get into your house? So many?”
“Maybe the place is built on an old Indian burial ground,” Levitt said. “Happens all the time.”
“That guy’s not an Indian,” Rufus said, pointing at the stumped zombie. “And he doesn’t look like he’s been dead that long.”
“Darn it. Was hoping you’d buy the Indian burial ground thing. Oh well. Better come clean. These all came out of my basement.” Levitt puffed on his cigarette and blew out a halo of smoke. They all observed the ring in silence. A good smoke ring was worth appreciating. “That’s the problem with shallow graves. I’ve never been a good housekeeper. One fella I buried and dissolved with lye, now he’s not going to stand up again and cause any trouble. Turned him into human lutefisk.” Levitt grinned. “I’ve been waiting to make that joke forever. This is very liberating.”
Otto didn’t understand what was going on, so he was alarmed when Dolph raised the rifle again and pointed it at Mr. Levitt. “You’re saying you killed these people?”
“Killed, and then re-killed tonight. Though tonight it was self-defense.” Levitt looked up at the ceiling, squinting, in thought. “Couldn’t try me twice for the same murder anyway, though, could they? Something about double jeopardy maybe? Well, I was never a lawyer, and didn’t worry too much about how I’d defend myself. Figured I’d never get caught. Didn’t expect to become a footnote in the books until after I fell over from a heart attack or blew a blood vessel in my brain and some grand-nephew or something came and tried to clean out the house and found what I’d been up to all these years. Doesn’t much matter now though. The dead are rising, which makes me think I’m going to be pretty far down on the list of priorities for law enforcement.”
“Mr. Levitt. You’re a serial killer. Holy fuck,” Rufus said.
“Language,” Otto said.