The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (23 page)

Stevie Ray looked around for ideas on how to stop this train wreck from happening, but Father Edsel and Pastor Inkfist seemed equally at a loss—Inkfist merely befuddled, Edsel pissed-off. They’d backed themselves into a corner. They’d wanted to use Levitt, like some kind of attack dog—or trained viper—and so they’d kept his terrible secret… a secret. They could tell the people here, now, that their hero was a murderer, but who would believe them? And if they
did
believe, they’d realize Stevie Ray and the others who knew about Levitt had voluntarily released him, allowed him to walk freely—relatively freely—about the town. That wouldn’t go over well. The idea of putting a bullet in Mr. Levitt’s brain was more and more appealing with every passing day, but Stevie Ray could barely bring himself to gun down a zombie, much less a man, even one as monstrous as Mr. Levitt, unless he had no choice.

Levitt himself stood up from the front row, turned to the crowd, raised his arms over his head, and—though his back was to the stage, so Stevie Ray couldn’t be sure, he was pretty sure anyway—gave them his big pie-eating grin. “Thank you!” he shouted. “I’m honored to have your support! I didn’t go looking for the job, but if you want me to be the mayor, I’ll certainly serve, and I’d be happy to say a few words about my vision for the town’s future just as soon as these little ladies up on the stage have their say.”

Julie and Eileen—who were normally about as friendly with each other as boiling oil and barbarian invaders—exchanged what Stevie Ray could only think of as a very
womanly
look at Levitt’s crack about “little ladies.” Eileen looked pissed, and Stevie Ray thought maybe she
would
say something about Levitt’s true character—did the old man even know she
knew
? But before it could become an issue, Dolph stood up and cleared his throat. “Uh, everyone, sorry to interrupt, but there’s something you should know. I wasn’t going to say anything, but…”

This is it,
Stevie Ray thought.
He’s going to tell them where Mr. Levitt’s bodies are buried. Or were buried, before they woke up.
Edsel and Inkfist had twin looks of terror, and Eileen’s expression was pleasantly surprised. Well, why not. She wouldn’t get any of the blowback from the deception. If Minnesotans were a tar-and-feathering type of people, he’d be worried for his skin, but they were more of a cold-shoulder-and-shun bunch of punishers. Unfortunately, in a zombie apocalypse, being shunned by the community could be as deadly as firing squad.
 

“Something to say, Dolph?” Mr. Levitt drawled. “Had a lot of time to think while you were in jail, did you?” He grinned at the crowd, but he misjudged them—the townspeople mostly felt bad for Dolph, and no one laughed. Levitt didn’t really understand people, after all, not any more than a rattlesnake did.

“I did, but this is… something else. You all know I took in little Mary Cooper.” Mary was ten, one of the orphans who’d needed to be relocated after the battle of the bus crash burned down the Knudsen Farm. Dolph had offered to foster her as part of his decision to stop moping in his cell and start trying to redeem himself and make up for his mistakes instead. Mary was with him, staring at her shoes, blushing bright red. “Mary was there, at the farm, when our brave boys—and Eileen, of course—fought off the zombies. She was in the kitchen when… Well, Mary, do you want to tell them what you told me?”

The little girl mumbled something, and Dolph put a hand on her shoulder, gently. “Speak up, darling.”

Everyone was silent, the only noise the hum of the space heaters, when Mary pointed at Mr. Levitt and said, “That man killed Grandpa Ingvar.”

The crowd didn’t exactly explode—this wasn’t Los Angeles or something after all—but there was a definite murmur.

“Honey,” Mr. Levitt said, in his sour old-man voice, “I know it’s confusing, but Mr. Knudsen was a zombie, and I had no choice—”

“I was hidin’ under the kitchen table,” she said. “Grandpa Ingvar said, you stay right there and be quiet, don’t you worry ’bout a thing, and he patted my hand, and I saw when you came in the door and he stood up and said oh thank goodness you’re here and you had that big ol’ knife thing and you—and you—” The little girl began to sob and clutched Dolph’s leg, and he patted her head.

“He was a zombie!” Levitt said, voice a little too high, a little too shrill. “He’d turned!”

Stevie Ray had lain awake nights and wondered if all the “zombies” Levitt had killed in the battle really were undead, or if he’d just taken the opportunity to murder some living souls for his own amusement—some of the bite marks on some of the bodies could have been postmortem, like they’d been bitten
after
getting shot or cut up, though he wasn’t any kind of doctor, so he couldn’t be sure. He’d even wondered if maybe Levitt had bitten those people
himself
to make it look like they’d been attacked by zombies. In the chaos, anything was possible, and Levitt had certainly been all-over-blood by the time it was over, so who knows what he’d been up to?
 

Should I take him into custody
? Stevie Ray thought.
On the say-so of a ten-year-old girl who might even have been coached to say this by Dolph?

But Dolph surprised him by taking a more nuanced and direct approach to sabotage: “Nobody’s saying you did it on purpose, Mr. Levitt. That would be crazy. I know it was an accident, that it was a scary time, you were probably disoriented—I mean, the things you did that day, it would have taken a lot out of somebody half your age—and Ingvar must have surprised you, and you just struck him without even thinking about it, maybe never even realized your mistake. But it
was
a mistake, a terrible mistake—and you all know I know what I’m talking about when I talk about terrible mistakes. I’ve made them myself, and…” He shook his head. “I’m not qualified to be mayor, either. You’re a hero, Mr. Levitt, no denying that, but it’s time you take a break. You’ve done enough for the people in this town. You don’t want to be mayor. A job that important, you wouldn’t want to make any more mistakes.” Dolph coughed. “Uh, that’s all. I’m going to take Mary home to bed now. Someone want to walk me?”

Rufus escorted them out, and Mr. Levitt leapt up on stage—he was still a nimble old goat—and shouldered Stevie Ray aside to stand at the lectern. “I’d be a fine mayor, and I have no intention of withdrawing my name from the race! I’m not confused, that little
girl’s
confused, and Dolph, he just wants to believe he’s not the only one damn fool enough to kill an innocent man for no reason, so he’s trying to drag
my
name down with him! I know you’re all too smart for that!”

The only response was a strained silence and a few coughs, and Stevie Ray laid his hand on Mr. Levitt’s shoulder. “We’re running behind, and Julie and Eileen need to make their speeches. We’ve heard what you have to say. Now let them have their turn.”

Mr. Levitt raised his arms and made V-for-Victory signs with his fingers, another gesture that showed his complete failure to read this crowd, and then he left the stage, walking all cocky, like he was the cat who got the cream
and
the canary.

After Eileen and Julie’s speeches, people lined up to vote then and there, shuffling through the line of curtained voting booths they’d set up, though they just wrote down their choices on slips of paper. Stevie Ray and Rufus counted the votes, and any momentum Mr. Levitt had gained was pretty well derailed by Dolph’s speech, though he still did better than Julie, who, having lived too long off and away in the cities, never really had a chance. Stevie Ray went to the podium and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present your new mayor: Eileen Munson!”

Eileen took the stage beaming and smiling and waving at the cheering townsfolk, and Stevie Ray thought,
Whatever reservations I have about that woman’s leadership, she’s a damn sight better than Mr. Levitt would have been.
Was there even a name for rule by serial killer? Murderarchy? Killocracy?
 

The runner-up himself was nowhere to be seen.

17

“S
o that’s the deal, then,” Cyrus Bell said, looking around him nervously, even though they were sitting in one of his cabins, and no one could possibly be watching or listening—though Cyrus’s paranoid worldview allowed for the possibility of miniature cameras in the light fixtures, mechanical teleoperated houseflies, and psychic warriors lurking insubstantially in the closets via astral projection. “I’ve been watching you for Stevie Ray, who says I have to make sure you don’t do anything crazy—I hate that word crazy, what’s that even mean?—and at first I went along with it, Father Edsel said it was a good idea, but me, I’m not a—I’m not a—I’m not a snitch, you know? Spying on people? Informing on people? When so many people spy on
me
? I admit it felt good being on the other side of the conspiracy for once, but what if I’m a dupe, a patsy, what if they’re using me, setting me up for a fall, or if it’s a test, if they’re doing a psychological experiment on me, or—”

“That’s good, Cy,” Mr. Levitt said soothingly, patting him on the back. “You did well. I’m glad you told me. And you’re going to stop watching me, right?”

Cy nodded. “But keep telling Father and Stevie Ray that I
am
watching you, that you aren’t doing anything at all but looking for zombies and killing them when you find them, that’s all. A man deserves his privacy, and…” Cy licked his lips. “And that other little thing. The thing you promised.”

“Of course.” Mr. Levitt handed over a bundle of dirty rags, and Cyrus opened them reverently, revealing a very old but well-preserved pistol with a squarish body and a round barrel. Mr. Levitt had taken it off one of his victims back in the early ’70s and held onto it, because you never knew when you might need a dead man’s gun.

“Is it… is it really his? It’s really Hitler’s gun?” Cyrus wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer, just an obsessed history—and history of weaponry—buff, but he couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice.”

“It is,” Mr. Levitt said, thinking,
moron
. “My father brought it back with him from the war.”

Cyrus stared at the gun. “Is there any, you know, provenance, or…”

“Oh, those kinds of papers, Cy, they can be faked, you know that. You can’t trust a paper trail.”

“That’s true,” Cy said doubtfully.

“But you can feel the psychic emanations, can’t you? Whenever I hold that pistol I feel the temperature drop by a degree or two, all that evil, that charisma, that power, lingering on the grip of the gun where the Führer’s hand touched it. Do you feel the presence?”

Cy shivered. “I do. I do. It’s colder now.”

Mr. Levitt patted him on the shoulder. “You keep that pistol—I never had a son to pass it on to, and you deserve it, for the kind and honorable treatment you’ve given me. Just keep giving those reports to Stevie Ray and Father Edsel. I’m going to leave now. Happy New Year, Cy.”

Cyrus didn’t look up from the gun, but Levitt felt his attention shift and focus on him. “Why do they want me to watch you, anyway, Mr. Levitt?”

“Why do the people who watch you want to watch
you,
Cy?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

“I don’t either,” Mr. Levitt said. “But I bet it’s because we’re free and honorable men who won’t do what we’re told.”

“God bless you, Mr. Levitt.”

“He already has by giving me a friend like you, Cy.”

18

L
ake Woebegotten had always been a pretty quiet place, apart from the cry of the loons over the lake, the Sunday church bells, the occasional plane passing overhead, the old air raid siren at unpredictable and incomprehensible intervals, and, on still days, the rumble of trucks drifting over from the nearest state highway. Since the zombie apocalypse it had grown even quieter, and as a result everyone tended to speak a little quieter, too, as if they were at a funeral, and they almost were: the world’s funeral, you could say.
 

So the noise of grinding, crunching metal was audible to Rufus and Joe Brock that day, driving in Joe’s four-wheel-drive pickup with the snow chains doing a perimeter sweep and looking for zombies. The old Andersen Road pretty much looped around the town on its way to nowhere in particular, and they were doing a leisurely—but vigilant—drive on a morning when there was actually some sunshine for once, peeking out occasionally from the gray cloud armor the sky’d been wearing for months. You couldn’t really see the road, since the town snowplow was being used mostly for the downtown area and to keep the road to Ingvar’s House of a Thousand Orphans clear, but you could sorta tell where the road was if you’d been on it a few hundred or thousand times before, and it was flat and curved around only gently, so the truck handled the ice fine. They went past trees, and fences, and fields, and more trees, and hadn’t seen much in the way of life, or, more importantly, unlife, except for a rabbit that went haring off across the road. Joe ran the rabbit over just to be on the safe side, and he and Rufus—who were not destined to be best of friends regardless, Joe being a sledneck who liked beer, crushing beer cans on his head, and hunting, and Rufus being, well, you know what Rufus is like by now—had been arguing about that decision for the past fifteen minutes, with Rufus taking the position that since the rabbit had been going fast it was obviously not a zombie, and Joe asking when was the last time you saw a rabbit running around in the dead frigid heart of February, and Rufus saying they couldn’t just go around killing indiscriminately and Joe saying he’d been known to run down a rabbit just for fun now and then even before the zombie apocalypse, and from there it was pretty clear they just had fundamental differences of worldview vis-à-vis animal rights, basic morality, and the edibility of intentionally-created roadkill.
 

Then the big crash, metal-on-metal, made itself heard over their bickering and the big truck’s engine. “All right,” Joe said. “Finally some real action.”

“We should call Stevie Ray,” Rufus said.

Joe sniffed and looked like he wanted to spit, but he wasn’t about to spit in his own truck, and it was too damn cold and gray outside—though it wasn’t actually snowing at the moment, too cold for that—to roll down the window or open the door to spit, so he swallowed it instead and said, “This is Interfaith Anti-Zombie Et Cetera business.”