Extreme Zombies, page 28
He follows her up the stairs and she hands him the basket, then opens the door to Patrick’s room. The priest pulls back but the room is empty, the door that joins it to Jesse’s closed. The bed is rumpled, as if the boy has slept in it, but she knows it isn’t so. She makes it up every morning, even changes the sheets once a week, but the boarders only bump against it, or sometimes fall onto the antique quilt. They never sleep, though, just get up and wander away. There are no mirrors in this room because the living dead version of Patrick doesn’t like his reflection and he always breaks them.
Fida takes the basket back and walks inside, then sets it on the dresser across from the door. She lifts the cloth reverently and stares at the contents for several seconds without saying anything, then backs away and looks at the priest. “Will you bless it now?” she asks.
Father Shane clears his throat. “Yes.” He takes his place in front of the dresser, bows his head and begins to pray, and Fida relaxes a little as the familiar words coat the air with promises of holiness.
“On the night he was betrayed, he took bread and gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said, take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.” Father Shane holds up one of the loaves and breaks it into two. She smiles and nods when he glances at her, then says in a soft voice. “I’ll be right back. I have to get my crucifix. Don’t stop.”
She feels his gaze as she slips out of the room, but when she leaves the door open, his voice resumes and she hears more confidence in it. Excellent.
“When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said, take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.”
He has spoken only a few words by the time Fida gets to the end of the hallway and Manuella’s door. She bends and sweeps aside the soiled clothing that has kept the living dead clustered there all day, then walks quickly back to Patrick’s room. She knows just where to step so the floor doesn’t creak, along the edges of the baseboards where the nails are strong and the old oak boards haven’t sagged in the middle. As she silently reaches out, pulls the door shut and bolts it, she hears another part of the Mass in her head, the words that are always said in preparation of the altar and the gifts. They are out of order, but there is nothing more appropriate.
May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all . . .
It takes only about thirty seconds for her boarders, her family, to lurch down to Patrick’s room, where the final door that separates them from Father Stane is not locked. A few seconds later, the priest begins to scream.
Fida sits on the hallway floor and stares at the crucifix she took off the wall down by Manuella’s room, discouragement leaving yet another a bitter taste in her mouth. She was wrong about Father Stane—his faith had not been strong enough, he hadn’t been truly sacred and believing in the body and soul of Christ. If he had, he would have been spared, and her loved ones would have eaten the blessed bread and wine, and they would have been cured.
She’ll just have to try again. There is another Catholic church, Saint Benedictine, about five miles away, and she can drive Father Shane’s car there next Sunday. After Mass will ask one of the priests to come to her home and speak to her in confidence.
These days, the priests are always out in the community, ministering and spreading the word of God for the good of all. No one thinks twice when they don’t come back.
Yvonne Navarro is the author of more than twenty novels, numerous short stories, and a nonfiction book. The recipient of a Bram Stoker Award for her young adult novel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Willow Files, Vol. 2, she was also nominated for a Stoker for novels AfterAge and deadrush. Novel Final Impact won both the Chicago Women In Publishing’s Award for Excellence and the “Unreal Worlds” Award from the Rocky Mountain News. Her most recent novels are Highborn and Concrete Savior. A long-time native of Chicago she now lives in Arizona with her husband, author Weston Ochse, two Great Danes, and two spoiled, over-sociable parakeets. Her website is www.yvonnenavarro.com.
There’s gotta be law, and the law’s gotta be blind. Some of the residents of Ocotillo might be dead, but they were still walking; they were citizens of a town that took care of its own . . .
We Will Rebuild
Cody Goodfellow
On the third monthly anniversary of V-D Day, some residents of Ocotillo still came out to wave or put Old Glory up on their porches as Deputies Snopes and Bascomb rolled up the nameless main drag in their armored cruiser, siren blaring to lift the curfew.
“Happy Death Day, suckers,” Bascomb hollered.
“Leave ’em alone,” Snopes said. “Everybody loves a parade.”
Bascomb made V-D Day medals out of Xmas ribbon and teeth for the occasion, but only Bascomb wore his, along with his Army Purple Heart and the special citation for the Battle of the Calexico Wal-Mart, two weeks ago. A Wal-Mart greeter’s nametag hung from the ribbon: HI! MY NAME IS SOLE SURVIVOR.
Verna Schepsi swept the sidewalk in front of the feed store, but it was a fool’s errand. The particles of ash that still rained down out of the sulfurous yellow sunrise were like downy snowflakes, merging into gray dust devils battling in the empty street.
Chubby Beckwith lumbered out of the Circle K and waved at them when he got to the end of his chain. Chubby was a good kid, always kept a fresh pot of coffee on until they ran out of it, but he got grabby when they stopped to top off the cruiser once, so they had to chop off his hands. It was all legal, the papers on file with the judge.
“Wanna go out to the canal and look for deadbeats?” Bascomb was crocked early and itchy today, because his wife got into it with Taffy, their Doberman pinscher. Reluctant to put either of them down, he was damned if he wasn’t going to shoot something today.
“Waste of ammo,” Snopes replied. “Besides, we got to go out and change the sign.”
The sign marking the Interstate 8 off-ramp used to read OCOTILLO; ELEV. 47; FT. POP. 220; GAS FOOD LODGING. As soon as the dust settled after V-D Day, they revised the list of amenities with big stenciled red NO’s, and shortwave and CB frequencies to call those inside.
Snopes had the idea to borrow the scoreboard numbers from the little league field. He displayed the number of the alive with the black numbers for the home team, and the number of the dead in the red for the visitors. The score was not encouraging: 32 to 67.
Gabe Gonzalez got bit by his daughter last night, and after they woke the judge up to sign the order, she was put down. Everyone pretty much knew what he was trying to do when he got bit, so no one was overly exercised about it.
Still and all, a pretty normal day . . .
Bascomb wanted to tack a 1 in front of the black number. “If any more gangs come looking for shit, we got to look tough.”
“When the Army comes, we got to look meek, so they don’t just bomb us. You heard on the radio what the Marines did to them rich dicks in Palm Springs.”
Snopes went up the road with his binoculars to check the perimeter. Ocotillo straddled the I-8/S.R.46 junction, snug between the Anza-Borrego mountains, studded with fractured granite boulders and the dusty, drained lake bed of the Imperial Valley.
Nothing alive or dead had come up the 8 or down from the hills in over a week. Gangs and deadbeat stragglers from the conflagration that destroyed El Centro and Calexico still dribbled in from the east, but deadbeats couldn’t cross the canal; burnt up with hunger and half-mummified by the desert sun, most of them dissolved like soda crackers in the swift current. Everything on wheels stopped where the deputies had blown the I-8 overpass at the canal, and either turned north on the 46 or abandoned their vehicles.
After that doctor from La Jolla, nobody had successfully pled for asylum in Ocotillo. When they let him in with his wife and three daughters, they thought they’d turned a corner; but three days later, the shitbird gassed himself and his whole family with their propane tank. The house blew up and burned down both its neighbors.
People from the cities couldn’t handle desert life, before or after Day Zero. Nothing out here had changed. There had always been laws on the books for dealing with aliens. If they were from outside the town’s jurisdiction and had nothing to offer, they had to be treated accordingly.
A couple deadbeats had wandered into the minefield along the highway a while back, and parts of them still tried to crawl through the tumbleweed snarls of razor wire that flanked the interstate and encircled the town. The fields were clearly marked for living and dead alike, cardboard signs and rotting, chattering heads on pikes, but nobody took time to read anymore.
Vultures and crows feuded over the last scraps on the skeletons of the latest live invaders—a small herd of runaway horses that had blundered into the claymores set up between the outbuildings of the abandoned Pernicano ranch. The yard sale scatter of long, elegant bones and stringy flesh looked like the ruins of something built to fly. Sometime ago, he might have seen something sad or beautiful in it, but now the waste of meat just made his mouth water.
In the crisp heat haze of the quickening day, everything seemed to squirm with a tortured thirst for blood and sweat. Snopes went back to the cruiser. With sheet metal and chain-link fence for windows, it was already a sweat lodge inside. Bascomb was in the driver’s seat, hooting at the radio like football was back. “Hell yeah!”
Snopes pushed him over and got in, turned back down the off-ramp. Bascomb loaded shells into the shotgun and stuffed the rest of them in his pockets. “Dead wetbacks!”
They passed Chubby again, who waved a stump at them as he chewed on the other, and a couple of boarded-up houses. Mrs. Chesebro wandered her dusty yard in her housecoat, looking for her cats. Next door, Chet Bamberger strained at the end of his leash to get his month-old morning paper. He wore only a wifebeater tanktop—second-skinned to him by yellow seepage, and drizzling maggots out the armpits. His muzzle was splashed with bright red blood, which, since his own was black and clotted in his feet and ass, clearly solved the mystery of the missing cats.
Bamberger was unemployed, and lost his license for a third DUI coming back from the Golden Acorn casino, so he and the deputies knew each other pretty well. He liked to tune up his wife, but she never pressed charges. He beat up Connie in Pal Joey’s Bar on V-D Day, and got locked up with some deadbeat tweaker from San Diego who’d crashed a stolen car on the off-ramp. The tweaker bit Chet, who died but got up and ate two of his cellmates.
Chet was one of the first locals to stir, and Snopes put four bullets into his torso that night. He sorely regretted that he didn’t know, back then, that you have to shoot them in the head. Order was restored, Connie took him home, and he hadn’t attacked anyone since. How they stayed together under one roof with no AC was a mystery to Snopes, but their problems were none of his business, until someone complained.
At the stoplight, Ocotillo showed that somebody really believed it would be a proper town, once. A shabby little bandstand and a pocket park once sat in the middle of the road, but now, the town square was a field of black, greasy ash. A sun-bleached and smoke-blackened banner hung over the street, reminding him to catch the Ocotillo Settlers’ Days festival that should have started last weekend.
The town hall was a sturdy whitewashed brick monument to itself, with a sheriff’s station, courtroom, mayor’s office, basement holding cells, and a broom closet that doubled as a library and civil defense shelter.
V-D Day was mostly peaceful in Ocotillo, until the panicked mass exodus from San Diego swept through, with the dead in its wake. Half the town bugged out for the hills, while the rest hunkered down in attics and cellars, or the town hall building.
Ocotillo was overrun and picked clean. Sheriff Lorber and the deputies holed up on the town hall roof when the remaining civilians fled or went down in the shelter. The dead converged on the town hall, wading into the ankle-deep gasoline pool Sheriff Lorber had drained into the square, and gawking up at them as they tossed road flares.
When the fire died down, the wave had crested and fallen, and the remaining deadbeats were easy to put down or contain.
Judge Dooling came down from his ranch that morning, and since the mayor was dead, he took over and restored order. Painting the town hall white again had been the first order of business.
The people in the shelter weren’t so lucky. When the power failed and the water pressure dropped, rats boiled out of the toilets and bit them in the dark. All the rats had feasted on the bodies in the streets, and were rife with the bug that made them walk and eat.
Whatever still knocked around inside was too dumb to work the hatch, but the Judge ordered them to open it. Three deputies had family in the shelter, and at first, they were just happy to have them back. Benedetto got careless, and was bit by his son. He looked happy, when he and his family lurched out of their trailer for the chow wagon. Espinoza ate his gun that night, after executing his deadbeat wife and his mother. Bascomb and his hogbitch wife fought almost every night, so for them, nothing much had changed at all.
In all, they identified seventy-nine walking dead residents, and sixty-three living. Getting the deadbeat locals to go home was easy; once chained down in their houses or at their jobs, most just did more or less what they always had, knocking around aimlessly until chow time, or until live meat got too close. Putting the muzzles on, though, was a king-hell bitch.
Deputy Mark Snopes had no family in town. He came over from the San Diego Police Department two years before, and was damned lucky to have a job. The cop mentality—us versus them, with any civilian more or less one of them—ground on his nerves. He tasered an enormous lady shoplifter when she got aggressive with him. She turned out to be five months pregnant, and miscarried.
In a burg like Ocotillo, it was the same problems, but smaller and simpler. Half the town out of its head on drink or drugs or God, and beating on the other half; shitheads and deadbeats passing through, littering and shooting up the signs; and wetbacks, creeping over the border and eating all the livestock. But it was better than the city. The desert took care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves. You knew who the good people were, and the right and the wrong of a situation was writ plain. Now, more than ever . . .
Snopes swung the cruiser into the town hall lot and jumped out. Bascomb called after him, “Fuck you, then, I’m driving!”
Betty Olson saw him coming, and unlocked the door, then locked and bolted it when he barged through the saloon doors that led to the courtroom. “I wouldn’t,” she whispered. “The generator’s out, so he’s in a mood.”
Snopes didn’t knock. The courtroom was darker than the other rooms, with no slits cut into the boards over the windows, and no lamplight. The dark was all violet fireworks until his eyes adjusted to the pinprick spiderwebs of daylight seeping into the courtroom.
In the stifling heat and silence, Snopes believed he could feel something scratching, like claws, on the concrete underneath his feet. Somewhere in the room, the dispatch radio crackled.
“Your Honor, even if there was something out there, we got bigger shit—beg pardon, sir—issues, to contend with, and I’m worried about Bascomb—”
“He’s worried about you, Deputy.”
“I can’t see you, Your Honor.”
A match flashed and kissed the mantle of a Coleman lamp on the judge’s desk. “The dark makes it feel cooler.” Only the gavel, drinking glass, revolver, and pale, liver-spotted hands came into view. “If we had gas to spare for the generators . . . but never mind. You wanted to resign, then?“
“You know I don’t. I take this job seriously, and since Sheriff Lorber got bit, me and Doug are pretty much the only law left. But this patrol duty isn’t going to solve anything. We’re just wasting gas.”
“Deputy, the migrant illegal traffic through this area is more of a scourge now than ever. You saw, yourself, what they did in Seeley and Calexico. You’d like to see them gather at the wire, I suppose, and overrun us again?”
Snopes couldn’t lose his temper with the judge, but the way he tied you up with his questions made his head hurt. “I’d like to clean up the mess inside the wire.”
“What mess is there? What haven’t you been reporting to me?”
Snopes came closer to the light. The outline of Dooling’s head floated in the dark above the perfect black of his robe. Hairless, blank as the moon. “Your Honor hasn’t been outside in a while, so far as I know, but I have, and I file reports on everything. Five of our people got killed this month in, uh, domestic disputes—”
“Nine died this month, don’t you mean, Deputy Snopes?”
“No sir, the other four were already—”
“They were citizens of this town, each and every one, never forget that. We take care of our own.”
“Sir, we have a responsibility to the living to protect them from the dead . . . don’t we?“
Judge Dooling looked Snopes up and down, his bifocals and his dentures winking in the yellow light. “Deputy, do you know why the dead got up last month?”
Snopes felt as if the courtroom at his back was packed with laughing ghosts, laughing at him. “No sir, I don’t.”
The judge clucked his tongue, a dry baby rattler sound. “Then how can you say you know what will happen tomorrow?”
Snopes headed for the door. “I don’t get it, Your Honor.”
Dooling’s chair creaked. “You are the arm of the law, young man, not its brain. The police have ever had the thankless duty of standing between the citizenry and their own worst impulses.”
