The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (26 page)

She’d wanted power, and instead, she’d somehow ended up with responsibility.

Eileen stepped out onto the porch, expecting the bracing blast of cold to do the job of waking her up that a half-cup of elderly instant coffee couldn’t do… but it wasn’t that cold. Brisk, sure, but only brisk. The snow had been gradually disappearing in the past couple of weeks, the town filled with the dripping of melting icicles, patches of white mostly clinging to shadows, the deep frost that turned the soil to stone finally loosening and the first green shoots poking up and reaching for the sun. By the calendar, spring had already come—the vernal equinox had, anyway—but this was the first day it had really
felt
like spring, and Eileen took a deep breath of air that didn’t burn her nostrils. Despite the hordes of people in her house and the responsibilities she’d only vaguely understood when she began campaigning for this job, she felt kind of hopeful. On a morning like this, with winter finally giving up its grip, the future seemed possible again.
 

The odd fellow folks called the Narrator wandered into the yard, squinting up at the sky, a low murmur coming from his mouth, sounding sort of like distant traffic or the sea or a toilet that wouldn’t stop running. He was dressed in suspenders and a bow tie twisted from horizontal to mostly vertical and he only had one shoe on, and the way he sort of slowly wove across the lawn made her wonder if he’d gotten himself zombified. What if he was saying “Brains, brains, brains” over and over?

But as he came closer she could make out his actual words, which were:
 

“Spring had come at last to Lake Woebegotten, with the snow keeping itself mostly to the shadows, and birds chirping as they flew hither and yonder looking for fat earthworms to have for breakfast, and all the animals of the forests and fields starting to get frisky, and the flowers, of course, just beginning to poke their heads up out of the ground like sleepy teenagers emerging from under their covers at noon. Of course, that spring, flowers weren’t the only thing you could expect to see coming up out of the ground, because that was the spring—”

He came a little too close to the front door then, and because Eileen was afraid he’d invite himself in for a half-cup of instant coffee, she interrupted him with a loud “Shoo!” and flapped her hands at him like you would at a stray cat, and the Narrator obligingly wandered off toward the edge of her property. She watched him weave on out of sight, then went inside to take her turn in the bathroom—there was a
chart
, with a
rotation
, and if you overslept or missed your slot then woe betide you because you’d have to make do with sponge baths until tomorrow, even if you were the mayor and this was your house—and get her cold shower and get dressed and ride over to the town hall where she had her “office” in a converted supply closet so she could keep this community from starving to death, drowning in sewage, being overrun by zombies, and generally collapsing. It was a lot of work but she guessed it beat housewifing.
 

One of the very few perqs of being mayor: she got a second half-cup of instant coffee because Stevie Ray was courteous that way, though he was the one who’d imposed—he’d say “suggested”—the rationing of supplies anyway
 

“Thanks all of you for coming out this morning,” she said, addressing the newly formed town council, which had not been elected so much as simply coalesced, drawing in the people who were interested and dedicated and willing to get some work done. They sat around a long wooden table in the town hall’s one conference room, with sunlight streaming in the windows, and it could almost have been a normal day in an undestroyed world, except then, she wouldn’t be mayor, would she?
 

She sipped her coffee, savoring the heat and warmth and the smell, though the flavor had never done much for her, and that powdered creamer substitute was no match for real milk.

Once upon a time she could have prevailed upon her lover Dolph to dip into his store’s supplies and give her anything she asked for, as such transactions had been central to their relationship, but things between them had dissolved, and after his accident, and imprisonment, and breakdown, and subsequent total personality shift, their relationship had cooled. It wouldn’t do for her to be caught angling for special favors anyway. Minnesotans weren’t too willing to tolerate corruption in their elected officials. Power wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, that was for sure.

She looked around the table, smiling and nodding as everyone got settled and took out their notebooks or fussed their coffee into some semblance of acceptability with little packets of artificial sweetener and powdered milk. Being mayor wasn’t exactly like being an empress, but Stevie Ray listened to her, and he was the man with the guns, so that was something.
 

And Pastor Inkfist treated her with a lot more respect than he had when she was head of the Women’s Circle—not that he’d disrespected her then, exactly, he’d just treated her like a mop or a microwave or an old reliable car, something that would do its job without complaint, something you didn’t have to worry about. Brent had treated her the same way, and look where that had gotten him. Father Edsel didn’t treat her with much respect, but he didn’t treat anybody with respect, so she didn’t let it bother her; he was just a Catholic anyway.
 

Julie Olafson—who was only on the council as far as Eileen was concerned because of some hereditary sentimentalism over her grandfather, who’d served as a councilman for many years, though officially she was here in her capacity as a diner owner, serving as a representative of the town’s business interests, which should have been Dolph’s job except he’d become a Communist or whatever and decided to give his store’s entire inventory over to the town to be distributed to those in need, which was both disappointing for her as a onetime lover disgusted at his weakness and gratifying for her as a mayor who appreciated the supplies—was staring into her coffee with her eyebrows drawn down, scowling, and while Eileen thought it
should
be nice having another woman on the council, she actually just found it annoying. Julie hadn’t come close to Eileen’s numbers in the mayoral race, but she’d gotten
some
votes, and that was irksome. Plus she had all sorts of ideas. Maybe even a vision, always talking about making the town into a green zone. Eileen, whose vision didn’t extend much beyond the next few days unless she strained herself tremendously, found that quality sort of offensive. Above her station. Uppity. Things like that.
 

The last member of the council was an unmarried Norwegian farmer named Torkelson who smelled of pig manure and had hands the size of cast-iron skillets, and who represented the interests of unmarried Norwegian farmers who smelled of various kinds of manure. He didn’t talk much, was often drunk, and tended to nod gravely at anything anyone said to him, often as a brief precursor to nodding off. But Eileen was scrupulously nice to him, always shaking his hand (though she washed her own thoroughly afterward), because Lake Woebegotten wasn’t getting food trucked in anymore, and Dolph’s store was pretty well cleaned out, and the town would only survive if the farmers kept farming and shared what they grew and raised with everyone else. It was an annoying situation.

Eileen didn’t like situations that couldn’t be favorably affected by the judicious application of chloroform or shotgun shells. She was good at thinking in a straight line, and could think in a straight line remarkably hard and far and thoroughly, but being mayor required thinking around corners, and that was kind of a stretch.

“So on the agenda today, we need to talk about sanitation, and about what kind of help the townspeople can give the farmers, and that’s about it, right?”

“Defense,” Julie said. “It’s right here on the agenda. The first item, actually.”

“Ah, of course.” Eileen picked up the agenda—the copies were handmade since nobody wanted to waste power on the library’s copy machine for so few pieces of paper—and made a great show of squinting at it. “Just had a little trouble reading the handwriting, here.” Julie went on and on about defense, Eileen heard she’d been in the military though apparently not in the US armed forces, and how did that even work, it sounded sort of disloyal, Eileen didn’t know the details and wasn’t about to ask but she figured it must involve something like the French Foreign Legion, the service for people who’d been disgraced and lived under assumed names and had syphilis. “Well, then. What do you suggest for defense? Should we dig a moat around the town? Fill it with lake water?” She smiled, but no one else seemed to find it amusing, which just went to show none of them were funny.

Julie stood up. Who did she think she was? “I don’t want to talk about practical measures today—I think the InterFaith group is doing a fine job patrolling, and after the events at the Knudsen farm, everyone is being especially diligent.”

“Volunteers have quadrupled,” Father Edsel rumbled. “We’re turning people away because we don’t have enough fuel for the vehicles.”

“Is Mr. Levitt still… behaving?” Eileen asked, giving the Father a meaningful look. Everyone in this room, excepting Julie and the pig farmer, knew exactly what Levitt was, and why they needed to be concerned about him, especially after Dolph’s accusations on election night.

“After moping over the mayoral race for a while, he’s going on regular patrols again,” the priest said. “Stevie Ray thinks it’s best to keep him occupied.” Best to keep him where someone armed could keep an eye on him, more like it, Eileen figured. “I understand he’s spending most of his free time visiting the local graveyards. He says he has more friends dead than alive these days. He’s been keeping things tidy around the graves, things like that.”

“He’s a credit to the community,” Edsel said, not bothering to hide the crushing sarcasm in his voice. Even though he was bossy, Catholic, and crazy, Eileen sometimes found herself liking Edsel. He was as straightforward as a bulldozer.
 

“We’re keeping an eye on him,” Stevie Ray said.

Eileen nodded. Stevie Ray had told her that he wanted to lock Mr. Levitt up again, permanently this time, that letting him out had been a terrible mistake even if it had seemed like the only choice at the time, but he didn’t want to move against the man too quickly—he thought Levitt was entirely capable of climbing to the top of the grain elevator with a sniper rifle and picking off townspeople, or wiring himself with explosives, or going on a last killing spree, if he felt threatened. Better to lull him into a false sense of security and then strike when he wasn’t expecting it. Eileen thought Stevie Ray was just afraid to go toe-to-toe with the man. A little poison, or a well-placed bullet, would have solved the problem, but Eileen wasn’t ready to suggest summary executions just yet. She needed to get everyone to accept her as judge as well as mayor first, and that was something she planned to ease up to.
 

“Back to my point,” Julie said. “I want to talk about the zombies—about the
nature
of the zombies. I’ve been… making some observations, and I’ve discovered something important. Something all of you should know. I think it will change the way we defend ourselves.”

“What’s that?” Eileen said.

“Easier if I show you,” Julie said, rising. “Would you all come with me to my grandfather’s house, after we finish the rest of the meeting?” That was met by a generally uncomfortable silence until she said, “I thought I’d make us all a little lunch.” Cafe Lo had never been known for its food, since the owner had been—still was, Eileen corrected herself, he wasn’t dead yet, and was technically a town councilman, even—a generally terrible cook. His granddaughter Julie, on the other hand, could do wondrous things with a few potatoes and cans of tuna fish, and Eileen—who’d always been a more dutiful than inspired cook—found her irritation at Julie’s presumption subsiding at the thought of eating a hot meal prepared by someone who knew a saucepan from a casserole dish. “That sounds just fine,” she said. “Shall we talk about how the town can help the farmers, Mr. Torkelson?

“Yah, we was thinking, we could use the zombies to pull plows, how about that? Hang a piece of meat on a string in front of their face and they’d pull all day, I betcha.” He beamed, delighted at the idea, and it took quite some time for the others to convince him there might be some downsides to the idea.
 

2. Biotropic,
Whatever that Means

P
astor Inkfist froze when, after feeding them all a little lunch of lemon bars, chocolate chip cookies—homemade tasting, not from one of those tubes Dolph’s store was handing out—sandwiches with cold slices of lunch meat and cheese (from Wisconsin, though you couldn’t hold that against her) and a dab of this and that and the other thing from her refrigerator, plus pickles and some leftover hotdish warmed up on the stove (which was good since hotdish tasted better the second day, everyone knew that, it gave the flavor of the soup time to soak into the noodles), Julie said, “Shall we go down to the basement then?”

They were all seated around Julie’s old wooden kitchen table, and the door to the basement was right
there
just a few feet away, a fact that had made Pastor Inkfist’s extremities tingle and cheeks just slightly blush. Everyone else seemed to have forgotten that they’d come over here for any reason other than enjoying Julie’s hospitality, as they all blinked around at each other with bits of cream of mushroom soup dabbing their chins. “Your basement?” Eileen said. “Oh, of course, you wanted to show us something.”

“You want to go… down there?” Daniel said, trying to sound casual. “In your basement?”