Zombie Angst Read online

  Zombie Angst

  Plight of the Living Dread

  second edition, July, 2014

  To the memory of Florence Couper who passed on the love of good grammar, good diction and the writing DNA. Dedicated

  Acknowledgements

  My wife Lian, for sticking with it and reading, editing and proofing something that is as far from her field of interest as an aardvark is from zydeco.

  My sister Marlene and father Archie for not considering me a deranged, depraved degenerate and actually reading, enjoying, encouraging and proofing.

  My son Dylan for making good plot suggestions and technical improvements.

  My daughter Sara for keeping me humble.

  Thanks to the people of Peachland, a real town, for involuntarily giving me literary license to distort their community for the sake of better fiction.

  No animals were hurt in the writing of this book.

  Any resemblance of living or dead people, to the characters in the novel, is just a weird coincidence.

  Neither a chemical spill nor a mishap at a nuclear plant started it. Neither did global warming, a meteor shower, an ancient curse, a pact with the devil or a research experiment gone wrong. Doctors, geneticists, military scientists and even lawyers, for a change, could plead innocent.

  1

  “Mmmmmmmmmm

  “Mmmmammmth

  “Mmmammmith

  “Mmmnammith

  “Mmmynamith

  “Mynammith

  “Mynamith

  “My namith

  “My name mith

  “My name ith.”

  An oversize clump of sodden rags, forced between slimy rocks by relentless waves could never have been taken for anything living until the tangled cloth enlarged, spread and formed arms and legs. The arms pushed the body from its bed of rocks and it rose in the moonlight on a pair of unsteady legs.

  It couldn’t remember its name.

  Through a fog-mire of mental mud the thing searched and could find neither memory nor recognition. It didn’t know what it was or where it came from. Concentration gave it a chainsaw headache. The creature’s mumbled words hit its own ears like static from an old radio. Confused yellow eyes looked around fuzzily to see where the sounds came from and found only rocks and water. A mob of angry mosquitoes buzzed about its head.

  “My name ith Mither Rogers.”

  The rumble started inside and as sounds dribbled from its mouth it knew it had spoken, spoken falsely. The oral olio lacked the familiar, comforting ring one’s name should bring.

  “My name ith Mither Thmith.” Equally strange.

  “My name ith Misses Smith.” A downward glance for sexual recognition found tattered, dripping pants that gave no clue. Protruding breasts did not block the view of a pair of large feet enclosed in soggy hiking boots. The putrid, moving rags felt more like a mister than a miss or misses, but no mental process steered it towards that conclusion. Peeing while standing made sense, but deductive reasoning had disappeared into the mental quagmire.

  It continued mumbling, “My name ith Mike … Mal … Milt … Mark … Mick … Mort.”Each name surfaced like a bloated fish floating up from the depths of a polluted pond. It preferred the sound of the last name and latched onto it.

  “My name ith Mort.”

  It expanded. “My name ith Morthimer.”

  Thoughts rang painfully as if its brain were the clapper of the bell at Notre Dame and he the demented hunchback.

  A vast expanse of lake offered no invitation to step towards it while, to the left, a distant array of dim lights beckoned like a lighthouse to a lost sailor. Walking proved difficult. Getting one foot to land in front of the other, rather than on top of it, led to stumbles and near falls. A subliminal flash of a woman and two children raced inside, from ear to ear, but he couldn’t corral it.

  Lights grew and their increasing intensity added more hurt to the reverberation inside his head. Pain did not prevent the beast from skimming the surface of wondering. Where did it come from, why did it have a second life, how long would it last? Such contemplations would be weighty prognostications within the echoing cranium of a regular, brain-dead revenant. Mort felt different, but knew nothing.

  Two evenings per week 70-year-old Mary Cotsworth, a grandmother, left her bridge party at 11 p.m. and walked three blocks to her Peachland home. Since crime in the small Canadian town consisted of a teen tagging a wall or a domestic argument getting too loud Mary had not the slightest fear for her safety as she pushed her tiny bunioned feet along the sidewalk, cane in hand. Two blocks short of her destination she spotted a shabbily-dressed young man staggering towards her. She thought him to be Milt Jacobs, a local deadbeat she didn't particularly want to encounter as he would surely beg for money or make sexual suggestions. She had just won $1.75 by sagely playing the right cards and the likelihood of her handing that over to him equalled the likelihood of her offering the pleasure of her wrinkled body. She crossed the street and continued on her way. The ne’er-do-well staggered to her side of the street.

  "Dreary me," she thought, "I'm just going to have to face him."

  A few seconds before they met an overwhelming stench suggested the staggering bindlestiff had vomited all over himself on a hot afternoon a week ago while losing control of his bowels and bladder at the same time. The stink punched into Mary’s nostrils and caused her to swallow hard to prevent tossing her tea and cookies.

  Continuing his unsteady forward lurch, the ragged creature put his right hand on Mary’s shoulder and her blurry vision encountered a face raw with acne worse than a teen’s nightmare. A vacant stare emerged from its shrunken, phlegmy eyes befitting someone a few steps from the grave. The reek nearly knocked her over as did the left hand that landed atop her head. Thinking that Milt had degenerated both physically and mentally and a sexual assault was at hand Mary rapped her cane sharply between his legs and whacked whatever dangled there. It surprised her that he seemed not to notice. Mary felt the strong hand on her head doing something mercilessly painful: she didn't know it had torn into her white-haired scalp. With full force she thrust her cane into the attacker’s torso and felt it sink mushily. A malodorous blast hissed outward as the foul hulk pushed her to the sidewalk and fell atop her.

  "Now the dirty business," Mary thought as she squeezed her knees together with a determination that could crush coconuts. Teeth slid across her cranium but her heavy skull protected the most vital part of her anatomy the same way the proverbial walnut shell protects its meat. Without taking a moment to appreciate how her skull guarded her brain, Mary commenced a hysterical scream that lasted but a syllable: a rock ended it. Her aged cranium cracked and the creature tore off shards of bone from which tightly-curled, blue-tinged hair sprouted. The color of exposed brain matched her hair. The creature stuck his face into the warm, welcoming softness and sucked up her memories, her love, her relationships and the questionable strategies that won her many bridge games and many dollars. Powerful fingers then moved lower to rip open both her dress and the abdomen beneath. Without preference they tore out organ after organ, devouring dripping spleen, liver, kidneys and then bladder, which let off a spray of delicious, mature urine. It was an oral orgasm.

  Sated and energized the creature rose to its feet and shambled along the sidewalk chewing on the ragged end of Mary's attached intestine, dragging her behind. A crimson streak and little body bits decorated the cement. A black terrier and yellow lab cleaned up. Looking back at the canine vultures the creature let out a guttural snarl that would send a junkyard Doberman cowering. The dogs fled.

  A block later, gnawing on rubbery duodenum and squeezing brown effluent into its mouth like toothpaste, the murderer tired of dragging the carcass and swung the intestine around its
head like an Olympic athlete throwing the hammer. After the toss it didn’t let go and Mary’s intestines stretched and she rebounded like she was bungee jumping. The body hit the staggering creature, spilling fluids onto its shoulders like multi-hued dandruff. With both hands he flung the light body over a hedge. It landed on an embankment and rolled onto the back steps of a hillside bungalow.

  Ten minutes later a dark creature’s white teeth sank into Mary’s thin neck and drew foul paste into its gleaming canines. Something had gone wrong, but the biting woman in black knew not what.

  With nothing to do and too late for coffee with friends the killer slogged back to the lakeshore and wedged itself between the same rocks that previously supported it. Sleep did not come. Cold air, jagged stones, wet clothes and worries about a new lease on life did not keep it awake. The creature simply didn’t know how to sleep. It lay, vacant and void, a sausage casing without filling. It listened to waves splashing over its boots. For comfort it mumbled “My name ith Mothimer” and it tried to capture the image of a woman and two children that had sped through its head.

  2

  On Friday morning Jack Weston confidently walked outdoors, the same as every other weekday morning, to drive to his job as shelf stocker at a local supermarket, a 10-minute walk distant. His ankle twisted and his head bumped a couple of times as he slid down his back stairs. Neither frost nor snow would cause him to lose his footing this early in the season and his kids had been whacked on the head often enough that never again would they leave a ball or toy on the steps. In his rapid fall down seven wooden steps something dampened his back and caused him to descend like he was on a slide rather than painfully thumping on each and every step. At the bottom he carefully got up, looked back and thought coyotes had dragged a deer onto his wooden staircase. But why would a deer wear a pink dress? Was it a cross-dressing stag, he wondered, or a deer that didn’t want to be buck naked? He loved bad puns, even in moments of stress.

  His cognition refocused onto what seemed less likely and his smile vanished as he recognized a bit of a face that looked somewhat human. A pale, bloodied leg definitely belonged to a human. Weston rushed inside, called 911 and ushered his kids out the front door and onto the school bus.

  The initialism RCMP represents Royal Canadian Mounted Police, commonly called Mounties or simply the cops. Their horse-riding heritage has been immortalized in their name.Corporal Jesse Nesterinko, a proud member, had no equestrian skills whatsoever and feared large teeth in the mouth of dumb animals. He arrived at 265 Lakeview Dr. mounted atop the passenger seat of a blue and white police cruiser. His senior partner, Sergeant Jane Dougherty, who, much to her dislike was called either Jane Dough or Plain Jane, handled the wheel as she usually did, enjoying being in control.

  An emergency call had come to their community police office and they rushed off with lights flashing and siren shrieking because the panicked caller had shouted about a mutilated body and a murder. A century had passed since a citizen of sleepy Peachland had been on either end of a homicide.

  Jack Weston led sergeant and corporal around the side of his house and pointed to bloody legs, arms, some pink cloth and a bit of a face atop a thin neck. A length of intestine protruded from the middle. They didn't call an ambulance: a body beyond repair was not hard to recognize. Sgt. Dougherty phoned for a crime scene photographer, a forensic specialist and a coroner. With yellow police tape streaming from her hand she brushed past her pale partner who leaned over a fence and struggled not to part with his morning meal. The corporal had hardened himself to the messy aftermaths of traffic accidents, but they were nothing compared to this.

  Jane put police tape around two entrances to the house plus gate and garage. Not wanting to disturb evidence she stepped carefully and told her partner to do the same once he quit holding up the fence. She called the chief of police in the bigger city of Kelowna, across the lake and described the scene. A naturalist with extensive knowledge of wild animals received her next call. He earned his keep by advising forestry and parks departments.

  A rusty, single-speed sidewalk cruiser – a strange bike for a hillside town − brought the naturalist from his home office to the crime scene within five minutes. Immediately he asserted that coyotes didn’t break open the skull and neither did a cougar. He theorized the victim had most likely fallen off a cliff, shattered her skull and a passing female bear took advantage of the opportunity, chewed out her abdomen and dragged her to the back steps of the suburban home. The naturalist quickly concluded by saying he would write a report and submit a bill.

  Through house to house questioning Sergeant Dougherty learned the victim was one Mary Cotsworth, who had been at a bridge party and was not in the habit of cliff walking on a dark October night. Grizzly bears did not inhabit the area and black bears preferred fruit and vegetables, ignoring meat unless starving. Bears didn't starve in autumn in a land of orchards and vineyards. A call to the naturalist advised him he would be paid for his time, but no remuneration was forthcoming for a report so he might as well stop writing. He countered that bear behavior could not be predicted and he would double-bill for his trouble if death by ursus Americanus was confirmed as the cause.

  The sergeant traced a thin streak of blood along a nearby sidewalk to what appeared to be the initial scene of the murder. At that spot the walkway bled with red. Bits of fat and gristle lay about although some of Mary had undoubtedly gone to a bulldog that rested on a lawn licking its numerous jowls.

  Sgt. Dougherty thought it could be little but murder: a murder most foul, a murder so odious that only a psychopathic escapee from a mental hospital could have committed it. She followed a pair of bloody footprints until the last faint impression vanished and then she phoned for tracking dogs that would not arrive for an hour.

  At her office Jane put out a database search and Jesse made phone calls. No psychopaths were loose and no one capable of such an atrocity had escaped from a mental hospital or prison. In 50 minutes the duo returned to the crime scene and met a man with a pair of sniffing and snarling canines. The bloodhounds took long whiffs of entrails, orts, bloodstains and whatever else dogs smell and one lurched in the direction the footprints led and the other strained the leash in the opposite direction. The handler followed one yelping dog and then the other, but ultimately each circled back to where they had started, snarled at each other and bit the hand that led them.

  Jane and Jesse continued door-to-door and not a single person reported hearing screams, shrieks, howls or outcries of any sort. Did Mary know the killer and not fear him? The trail went icy cold: no clues, no motives, no logic and nothing to go on. Sore losers made statements about how Mary played bridge, but no one seemed capable of killing her over $1.75 in questionable gains. She had no known enemies, didn’t deal drugs and didn’t belong to a motorcycle gang. Her estate didn’t amount to enough to cause anyone to look forward to her death.

  Three crime scene specialists arrived in early evening and reached an inconclusive consensus two hours after taking samples of body parts: "Never seen anything like this. Looks like an animal, maybe a cougar... haven't seen cougar this year. Might be a bear, maybe a crazed grizzly? Some kind of mad animal." Jesse inquired about mad cow disease and received strange looks and no answers.

  The investigators sent samples, photos and descriptions to higher level experts on the coast. In the back of their van they wrote a report and from the Peachland police station faxed copies to specialists in Vancouver and Victoria.

  After the CSI trio departed Jane read the jargon and then informed her corporal, "They speculate the abominable snowman might have done it."

  "A snowman with a big belly in October?" Jesse questioned.

  "Abominable, like an abomination, nothing to do with bellies."

  "Yea, I was kidding. As if a big snowman came out of the woods, tore an old lady apart and then melted."

  "They say the only similar case happened two years ago near Kamloops and people saw a Bigfoot running from th
e body."

  "How can a big foot run? It would have to hop.”

  Jane started laughing then caught herself. This was serious business. She had worked with Jesse for more than a year and still he caught her off-guard with his humor. She often wondered if she was laughing at an intended joke or stupidity. He came to Peachland from Edmonton where he had taken police training and been far from the top of his class. Various west coast towns had been home, but the first thing he said on his first morning on duty in Peachland was that he had finally found a real home. His simple wit, athletic good looks and love of life attracted Jane, but she had two years on him and held a senior position in the same office. Remaining aloof eliminated complications. While he bounced from woman to woman Jane stayed home, tended her garden and put in volunteer hours warning high school kids about drugs, sex and driving. She had extensive personal experience in one of the three. Fortunately the students enquired about her adventures behind the wheel and showed no interest in whether she took illegal drugs or practiced safe sex. Had they questioned her about either the answers would have been short.

  Jesse summed up the crime report, “So we've got a snowman with a big belly and a big foot that rips people apart and then hops away with their body parts and melts."

  "It doesn't melt and it's not a snowman. The natives called it Sasquatch. In Nepal it's yeti, a big, hairy, secretive cryptid that survives in the wild. Most people think it's a myth, but every once in a while someone catches a glimpse of one. The sightings come from reliable, serious people, but no one ever gets a photo – just a big footprint or a tuft of white fur. Sort of like the Loch Ness monster or Ogopogo who supposedly lives right here in our own lake. Some think the yeti creature descends from gigantopithecus. I looked that up."

  "It stands to reason a big abdominal snowman would take a gigantic piss-icus."