Zombie Angst Read online

  "So that's where we stand," summarized Sgt. Dougherty, refusing to smile. "The most violent murders in the history of British Columbia and the only suspect is Bigfoot. This is the first murder in this town since the days of gold miners and gunslingers and it’s on my watch. I have to solve it."

  "How does the report know that Hopalong the Snowman did it?"

  "Doesn't. They'd never say that. The report just gives measurements and analysis that add up to nothing. It compares it to a Kamloops murder where a big creature was spotted running from the crime scene. In Kamloops internal organs went missing, just like here, but the biggest difference is the brain – it wasn't touched. The report says Mrs. Cotsworth landed on the stairs pretty hard: fractured ribs, broken spine, but she was dead when she hit the stairs. They found human hair on her cane and her body. Man's hair, hair that hadn't grown for a couple of months. From someone about age 30. She has no husband or lover or son. No men in her life. The ones at the bridge party were all over 60. Her purse was found in some shrubbery with nothing missing. So it wasn’t robbery. Wasn't rape. Scratches on her body match human fingernails. Cougars and bears have claws. Sasquatch would have fingernails, I guess. Any ideas?"

  "I'd go with the monster theory," the corporal answered. "No person in Peachland or anywheres around here is gonna do that. So we have to track down this creature with a big foot."

  "His feet actually weren't that big. The bloody prints are bigger than average, but not enormous. Wore some sort of outdoor boot. Should get a report on the make and where they are sold. A team from Vancouver arrives soon. Maybe they'll find something we’ve overlooked."

  "Is Hannibal Lecher still in jail?"

  The Peachland police focused on the crime scene and its surroundings. Jane relentlessly knocked on doors, searched shrubbery, measured distances and carefully examined video from the town’s only surveillance camera. It recorded grainy pictures of a lakeshore park in which nothing untoward happened. She felt guilty that her force had not protected Mary, as was its duty.

  Had Jane and Jesse ventured a couple of miles farther afield, specifically to the local hillside cemetery, their questions would have been answered. The indigent that Mary, to her everlasting misfortune, misidentified as Milt actually bore a similar name, Mort, only two letters different. They would have found Mort at the graveyard.

  3

  The cause of Mort’s awakening on the Peachland shore had origins so unique and convoluted that only a few wide-eyed experts, in retrospect, grasped what had gone on and understood why it happened.

  Earth, sun, moon and several planets aligned at precisely the same time as a meteor shower, which coincided with one of the biggest sun flares of the century. No big deal. For a few minutes phones didn't work and computers acted like a virus had wormed its way in. Owners of complex new vehicles, such as BMWs and Jaguars, discovered that their cars reversed when wipers and seat heaters were sequentially voice-activated. Sanyo blow dryers set hair on fire, Phillips electric razors sucked skin and expensive toasters incinerated bread. Several other everyday appliances seemed to rampage against their owners, including electric toothbrushes that went berserk and choked their users.

  Those who dwelled in basement apartments felt a surge of energy, which was a good thing, because their cement walls turned powdery and they had to work ceaselessly to keep them from caving in. Trains and planes ran a few minutes late but, for the vast majority on planet Earth, Thursday, October 8, 2015, passed uneventfully. The unusual cosmic circumstances created nothing more than minor inconveniences: no little green Martians landed, Godzilla did not attack Tokyo and the air did not become toxic.Peachland proved different.

  From time to time lightning bolts have hit leaking transformers located next to satellite dishes. This electro-chemical reaction, when at the edge of a cemetery, has caused the occasional corpse to rise from the grave, grab at an ankle and scare someone half to death. Usually this happens in cities where a crop of freshly dead rests in the right place at the right time. Rather than allow mass hysteria, certain authorities hunt down the ghouls, disguise the event as a college prank and the whole affair becomes urban legend.

  When those who have actually had their ankle grabbed by a resurrected corpse tell their story they hear a bounty of laughter. The ultimate quasher of their urban folklore comes in the form of a simple question: How can a corpse escape from a tight coffin, get through tons of dirt and rise to the surface? The correct answer is not, They can't, but rather, With great difficulty.

  The first to lose brain, liver and other vitals made their home in the aforementioned hamlet on the shore of Okanagan Lake in the south of the province of British Columbia, in western Canada, about 250 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 110 miles north of Washington state in the U.S.A.

  Mountainous topography, uranium deposits and fresh water all combined with lightning strikes to form unique conditions that magnified the supercharged radio waves created in space by the alignment of planets, moon and sun at the time of meteor showers and humungous sun flares. The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, where eight giant antennae collect radio waves emitted by stars, put the final nail in the coffin that caused the dead to rise and the live to die.

  Located south of Peachland, within a circle of mountains that keep out man-made interference, the enormous disc antennas have enough sensitivity to detect a cell phone ringing on Mars. At least that’s the unverified claim. Having the capacity to collect radio waves also creates the hitherto unknown capacity of redirecting those waves, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, into the earth that supports the bases of the antennae.

  These phenomenal geomagnetic waves, between visible light and X-rays in length, surged into the earth, followed a fault, and caused some trees to lose their leaves, some mice to become hyperactive and some birds to fall from perches. Within the norms of nature, that was the extent of damage although a lot of people complained boisterously of painful static sparks when they walked across a rug. Had they known the relative insignificance of static shock they would have brushed it off.

  Save for a woman who had been hit on the head by a golf ball, declared dead and recovered, no one in Peachland had any experience with afterlife. Of all the fears a person walking alone in Peachland could have, getting whacked by a golf ball or having a liver ripped out by a ragged creature of the night resided next to each other at the bottom of the lists, just ahead of getting crushed by a safe falling from a window. No one knew that when the undead encountered the unwary the result could be nothing but inevitable.

  Not everything was evil at the time of the rising for, as a general rule in nature, every action has an equal and opposite reaction: every negative has an equal and opposite positive. Like many other small towns Peachland’s alterlife included secretive goblins and gnomes. The former generally do good and the latter live sedentary lives disguised as lawn ornaments and don’t give a shit. All received an unexpected electro-magnetic charge, but who would be alarmed if an energetic goblin, stooped like a leathery old man, held out its hand to help a blind lady across the street? An animated gnome in the garden delighted homeowners who dared not call the SPCA lest the little fellow be taken away and put down. Or the caller be taken away and locked up.

  4

  At first suggestion of dawn's early light, Ramon Reynolds, proud proprietor of a profitable Peachland hair parlor, whistled a happy tune as he loped across the dewy, dense grass of Peachland’s hilltop cemetery. He appreciated the view of a snaking river that slithered and hissed its way out of a narrow lake.

  A path that his walking shoes helped trample meandered between tombstones and served as a shortcut to his father's house where a breakfast of eggs Benedict and slightly burnt toast awaited his arrival.

  The eerie silence and isolated setting sometimes caused him to imagine weak voices calling from below and beyond, but for the sake of saving 10 minutes he endured the shortcut and the fragments of his imagination. Within the month lawyers would close
the deal on his new house, located four blocks from his father’s, and he would traipse his last through the burial ground. With the first bite of his father's whole wheat toast he would laugh at his superstitions and enjoy the best of times as he amazed his dad with details about his hairdressing business and how clients lined up to sit in the expensive chairs that paid for his new lake-view home.

  A tune from The Sound of Music … The Hills are Alive … whistled from between his dry lips as he thought about the hot Colombian brew that awaited him. His left foot landed in the anticipated manner and then solid ground did not support his right.

  At least twice a week a rusty sprinkler system automatically watered the graveyard grass and a gardener, with mower, fertilizer and seed, made the grounds resemble a green blanket atop a brown beach instead of blending in with the sepia aridity of surrounding hillsides. The Sonora desert, a delta of dryness, sweeps north from Mexico and pokes its nose into Canada, barely sniffing the town of Peachland. The settlement receives just enough rain to escape being classified as a desert, but not enough to grow anything of significance without irrigation.

  The hairdresser’s legs plunged downwards and his whistling suddenly sounded like an asthmatic Scotsman blowing his last note into a leaking bagpipe. Ramon scrambled to get out of the hole into which he had fallen hip-deep and it felt like a bear trap had snapped onto his leg: he couldn’t break free. Looking down, the thin hair stylist expected to see his foot wedged between some rocks, but instead a graveyard fear worse than anything he ever imagined became reality as, in the dim morning light, he viewed a skeletal hand gripping his ankle. Stunned and disbelieving, the hairdresser stared, unable to comprehend. A bony head broke through parting dirt and its rotting jaw, dripping with maggots, lunged forward and a set of crooked black teeth sank into his right leg. A stench of foul putrescence detonated in the hairman’s nostrils and caused his stomach to roil. This isn’t real, he thought, and anticipated waking from a nightmare, relieved to see his bedroom furniture. He blinked sleep from his eyes and refocused: the teeth of a drooling corpse pulled flesh from his leg.

  The panic that ensued gave Ramon strength beyond anything he thought possible. He writhed, screamed, squirmed and his thin, adrenaline-infused muscles ripped his leg from the steely grip. With forearms atop the hole into which he had fallen Ramon hoisted himself upward towards freedom and fresh, fragrant air. Immediately he regretted his obsession with tying his laces neatly and tightly: he couldn’t slip his foot out when the horrid hand clamped on his shoe. Despite his desperate, energetic panic, Ramon could not shake free and again the jaw of irregular teeth sank deep into the side of his leg sending messages of pain with an intensity he had never known. Tears rushed into his eyes and he saw the decrepit head pull away with a mouthful of bloody, stringy bits that were essential to providing bipedal locomotion.

  In different circumstances, with time for contemplation, Ramon might have used his mental dexterity and imagined the predator’s dark teeth whitened, the clumps of missing hair replaced, the sallow eyes brightened and blush applied to the rotted skin. Had he done so he would have recognized the living corpse as a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart Barbra O’Day. Just two years ago he wore a black suit at this very graveside and watched her descend into the earth. With wet eyes he had thought about how his skinny schoolmate had taken steroids, bulked up and, after strutting a stage, flexing muscles and juggling five-pin bowling balls, became Miss Peachland Pitt. Were it not for a burst aneurism, as she balanced the balls, she could have moved on to compete in the Kiwanis Club’s regional championships. Making a positive ID on the thing in the dirty hole had no value as a survival tactic. Nothing indicated that the monster would back off if he said, “Hi Barb, remember me? We both took French in Madame Lepage’s class.”

  Ramon groped for a rock, a branch, a shard of tombstone – any kind of weapon with which to knock the teeth out of Barbra’s stinking face. Sand and dirt filtered through his fingers. A flurry of kicks and jabs at the miserable visage, with his free leg, did nothing to discourage whatever or whoever feasted on him.

  More of his leg vanished into the mealy, ravenous mouth and his blood leaked out the sides and dribbled down the remains of her weak chin. Loss of blood would bring death within minutes, Ramon Reynolds realized. He loosened his belt, whipped it out and reapplied it as a tourniquet just below the knee where the creature grasped and chewed. He hoisted his other leg above the grave as far from danger as possible.

  The belt stopped the eruption of blood and although he felt lightheaded, Ramon knew that death no longer lingered at his doorstep and he had a chance. Holding the end of the belt between his teeth to keep it tight, he grabbed dirt by the handfuls and threw it down on Barbra. Clumps of sod, loose gravel and anything he could grasp, including an empty cola can and some wilted flowers in a plastic pot, hit the reeking head and made no impression. The shower of debris almost buried the creature but it did not let go.

  Reynolds's chewed leg vanished under added dirt and while thoughts of infection briefly entered his head it did not stop him from trying to cave the entire grave onto the odious thing. Feeling more optimistic about his chance of escape he lowered his good leg to gain leverage and push himself upwards. The ghoul lunged from beneath the dirt, head and shoulders visible, and Reynolds quickly jerked the limb back to safety. Like a dog obsessed with a bone, the monster went back at the other leg and her next bite included a bit of the belt. Reynolds knew the loss of his tourniquet equalled the loss of his life so, with a gush of blood, he repositioned it above his knee. The foul thing attacked the knee, pulling away loose skin and baring the patella. The thick meat above that joint next attracted the teeth and forced Ramon to again reposition his live-saving band higher on his thigh. As light nudged the horizon, he watched his leg vanish bit by bit into the mouth of a creature that should have been dead. The more the ghoul ate the stronger it got and the higher it rose from its grave. Kicks and punches had no effect: the tug-o-war with his leg was a dead heat with Reynolds retaining the bone and the monster getting the meat. He battled harder than anyone would expect from a pale, middle-age hairdresser whose only strength resided in fingers that clipped hair all day. He kept his good leg out of reach as he continually raised and tightened his belt to prevent bleeding to death. Eventually the monster rose, almost out of the ground, and Reynolds moved the belt up to his groin. Shredded strands of veins, tendons and ligaments dangled from white bone below his knee.

  The ghoul lunged forward, mouth wide, and in a single bite through denim pants removed Reynolds' undersized and underused reproductive organs. An eruption of blood and a horrendous high-pitched scream, sufficient to wake the dead, followed and the monster swallowed. Reynolds saw his penis and testicles enlarge the mottled skin of Barbra’s slug-infested throat as they slid down. He felt sick and passed out, but not for long enough that his hitherto uneventful life could pass before him like a dull movie that he would walk out on.

  At a different time and in a different place, perhaps with an ambulance on call, he could afford a state of shock induced by pain, fear and blood loss. In those minutes of delirious peace he could mentally edit the movie of his life and give it meaningful drama leading up to the impending tragic denouement.

  Aware of the proximity of this deadly state of shock the hairdresser counter-attacked by falling forward and pushing his thumbs into the soggy eye sockets of his assailant. He smelled sun-baked road-kill as yellow eye-snot squirted onto his palms. No sounds of protest came from the beast: it did not release its grip.

  Both parties pulled back their torsos as if to re-evaluate their battle plan and in the momentary deadlock he searched for another strategy and his hand reached farther and found what it had been grasping for − a rock, smaller than he wanted, barely palm sized. It crashed against his vile opponent's skull and nothing happened, nothing at all. Pounding a tree would have produced more tangible results. He did it again and the beast, apparently blind, but not unconscious
as it should have been, thrust its head forward with jaw snapping. Again the granite chunk met the patchy hair of Barbra’s wretched head: the skull cracked and thick black fluid dribbled out. Fighting for his life, Reynolds whacked the skull again and again while the mouth bit randomly in his general direction and the bony hands searched for something better than leg bone. On the eighth whack the head snapped sideways on its pustular neck and the thing toppled backwards into its grave. Dead, thought Reynolds.

  The joy of survival diminished as he contemplated hobbling around his hair salon on one leg and never being able to father children or receive pleasure from a bedmate. Why bother living, he wondered as his teeth pulled on the end of his belt while his elbows found purchase on the ground. Instinctively he urged his body out of the hole and defeatist thoughts vanished. Should he stand up and hop for help, he contemplated, or would crawling be a better strategy. His leg looked like it had dangled in a pond of piranha. His dilemma found resolution when a spidery hand clamped onto his good foot and the cockeyed head, with a well-aimed bite, removed his toes. Undeterred by this minor setback Ramon bent forward and pounded the grasping hands with his rock until they became a pair of useless pancakes. Blood fled from his new wound so he ripped out the lace from the shoe with the missing toe and tied it around his ankle. Then he yanked off his Grateful Dead T-shirt and stuffed it into the gaping hole in the crotch of his pants.

  Crawling commando-style on elbows, Reynolds scrabbled down a steep slope, praying he could get to the road that wound along the bottom of the hillside a mere 50 yards ahead, before death made its call. At an embankment above the road consciousness vanished. His last effort of supreme will was to push himself down the hill. On the descent he hit a rock, knocking out his front teeth and breaking his nose, but he was spared the additional pain because of unconsciousness. Rebounding downwards he encountered a tree, whacked his skull, lost a patch of hair and mercifully came to rest at road's edge.