Best New Zombie Tales: Vol. 1 Part 5

Natalie stood and bits of turkey lunchmeat dropped from her thighs onto the floor. She stretched out her arms and stumbled toward him.

Kirk moved backward quickly, until his back was pressed against the door. She closed in and wrapped her arms around his neck. He shuddered at the sensation of her cold, scaly skin rubbing against him. Her face filled his field of vision and the closer she got, the more Natalie opened her mouth. The odor that came out of her brought tears to Kirk's eyes and he pushed her away a second before her teeth clacked together. He reached behind him, grabbed the doork.n.o.b, opened the door and quickly backed out of the room. He pulled it closed and stood there clutching the doork.n.o.b with both hands.

He took a few deep breaths as his stomach roiled with nausea from her horrible smell. But it was her attempt to bite his face that made him realize what a horrible mistake he had made.

The doorbell rang. Randy and Liz normally would walk in without ringing the bell or knocking when they knew Kirk was home alone, but Kirk's parents always locked the door when they left in the morning, even if someone was still at home.

"Natalie, listen to me," Kirk said to his bedroom door. "Stay in there and I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?"

"Hungry," she whimpered.

"Just stay there for a few minutes and I'll be right back." He hurried down the hall and opened the front door.

Liz had a satchel slung over her shoulder. She patted the satchel and said, "I a.s.sumed you wanted clothes for Nat, right?"

"Yes."

"My mom refilled her Vicodin prescription this morning," Randy said with a grin. "I brought two for each of us."

Kirk closed the door and said, "Come into the kitchen, we can have Pop Tarts, or something."

In the kitchen, Kirk took a package of Pop Tarts from the cupboard and dropped three of them into the giant toaster.

"Where is she?" Randy asked, looking all around with caution.

"In my bedroom. And she's hungry."

"Oh, f.u.c.k," Randy said as he handed out the Vicodin. "Hungry for what?"

"Not for Louis Rich sliced roast turkey breast, I know that. She almost took a bite out of my face."

"You were right, Liz," Randy whispered. "She's been reanimated. She's a zombie. A flesh-eater."

"Come on, Randy, could you cut that s.h.i.+t out," Kirk said, but without anger.

"But that's what we're dealing with, right?" Randy said. "What if she'd bitten you? Is it contagious? In all the movies, if you get bitten by a zombie you turn into one. All I'm saying is, we should think about this s.h.i.+t and be prepared."

"He's right, Kirk," Liz said. "We should be careful around her. A bite could be bad."

As realization set inMrs. Kobylka had not given him Natalie, she had given him a reanimated corpse with a twist of cannibalismKirk was overcome by vertigo and swayed, grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter for anchor.

"Dude," Randy said.

Liz said, "Are you okay, Kirk?"

"I'm just trying to wrap my brain around all this," Kirk said. The dizziness pa.s.sed.

The Pop Tarts popped up and startled them. Kirk opened the refrigerator and handed each of them a Mountain Dew, got one for himself. They drank the pills down with the soda, then ate the Pop Tarts as they talked.

"What are we going to do?" Kirk said. "Why did you want us to come in Liz's car?"

"Because n.o.body else drives Liz's car but Liz, so they won't notice the smell."

"The smell?" Liz said. "Hey, I'll notice the smell."

"We'll roll down the windows, Liz. I don't have anyone else to ask, or I would. My car's totaled, remember?"

Liz thought about it a moment.

"I've got air freshener," Kirk said.

Liz was reluctant. "All right. Where we gonna go?"

"To see Mrs. Kobylka."

"Again?" Randy said.

"This isn't what I asked for," Kirk said.

"Are you sure, Kirk?" Liz said. "Think about it. That old lady might speak with an accent, but I bet she understands English just fine, and she's probably going to hold you to whatever you said, word for word. What did you say to her?"

While Kirk tried to remember his words, Randy said, "You said you wanted her to bring Natalie back. That's all you said."

Kirk knew he was right. He had been no more specific than that. It hadn't occurred to him that he needed to behe thought bringing Natalie back would result in bringing Natalie back, not creating that hungry, smelly, decaying thing in his bedroom.

"You're right," Kirk said. "That's all I said."

Liz nodded. "She'll probably remember that and throw it right in your face."

"But there's got to be some way of getting rid of... of..." Kirk couldn't say her name, he could not say, But there's got to be some way of getting rid of Natalie. He told himself that was okay, because it wasn't Natalie they were dealing with. "... of getting rid of her."

"She said there was no way to undo it," Randy said. "Remember?"

"But there's got to be," Kirk said. "Some spell, some potion to make her... like she was before."

"You mean, dead?" Randy said.

"Yeah."

"She's already dead, Kirk," Randy said. "You need something that'll get that through her f.u.c.kin' skull."

"Where is she?" Liz asked.

"In my bedroom," Kirk said. "We should go get her dressed. But I'm warning you. She doesn't look good. And the smell..." Kirk got an idea and turned to a tall, narrow cupboard next to the refrigerator. On the top shelf, Mom kept a variety of over-the-counter drugs: aspirin, cough syrup, ant-acids, Bactine, rubbing alcohol. He took down a blue jar of Vicks VapoRub and unscrewed the lid. He held the jar out to Randy and Liz. "They did this in Silence of the Lambs. Put a little under your nose. It'll help with the smell."

"Is it that bad?" Liz said.

"It wasn't as bad as I'd expected," Kirk said, "until she opened her mouth. And her legs. If you get too close... well, it's pretty bad."

They put a little of the strong-odored ointment just beneath their noses and Kirk replaced the jar in the cupboard. They left the kitchen and walked down the hall.

"She's not all there," Kirk said quietly. "She seems to have some memories, but... it's not really Nat. She's really just a"

Even through the Vicks, Kirk smelled Natalie in the hall just a second before Liz screamed behind him.

Kirk spun around and saw Liz standing at the bathroom door staring in with a hand over her mouth. He and Randy went to her and looked into the bathroom.

Natalie was lying in the bathtub, knees hiked up, feet resting on the edges of the tub. She held one of the limp ferrets in her hands and gnawed into its belly. Blood was smeared on her face and was matted in the animal's fur. Natalie made small guttural sounds as she bit into the dead ferret, stopped to chew for a moment, then bit in again. A strand of intestine dangled from the ferret's open abdomen.

Kirk, Randy, and Liz stood frozen just outside the bathroom doorway, their jaws slack. Natalie stopped eating and slowly turned her head toward them. A tuft of bloodied fur stuck out of the corner of her black-red mouth. When she spoke, her voice sounded like a clogged drain.

"Hungry," she said. Then she buried her face in the eviscerated ferret again and continued to eat.

"Oh Jesus breakfast," Liz said. She stepped into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid and seat, knelt before it, and vomited.

Randy stepped away from the door and leaned his back against the wall. He took a couple deep breaths and swallowed hard a few times.

Kirk rubbed the back of his neck as he paced in the hall. "What am I going to tell my mother?" he said, his voice hoa.r.s.e.

After flus.h.i.+ng the toilet and rinsing her mouth in the sink, Liz came out of the bathroom looking pale and unwell. She leaned against the wall beside Randy, then he put an arm around her and she leaned on him.

Kirk stood in the doorway again and watched as Natalie ate his mother's ferret.

That story you hear, what happen to that dog? Mrs. Kobylka had asked. Your girlfriend... she's no dog.

Kirk wondered what the old woman had meant. He wondered what had happened to the dog in the story pa.s.sed down by children over the decades.

He scrubbed his face with both hands and said, "I've got to clean up this mess. You guys don't have to help if you don't want, but... I'd sure appreciate it."

- FIVE -.

As he held open a white garbage bag so Kirk could drop the gutted ferret into it, Randy winced, looked away, and muttered, "Guess what I did on my Christmas vacation."

Kirk and Randy began to clean up the b.l.o.o.d.y mess in the tub. Kirk had already gotten most of the blood off Natalie, and she was in his bedroom with Liz, who'd said she would try to get her dressed.

"But if she tries to f.u.c.kin' bite me," Liz had told Kirk, "you're gonna have to do it yourself."

Once the bathroom was clean, Kirk threw the b.l.o.o.d.y sponge and rags into the garbage bag with what was left of the ferret and tied it off. He carried the bag out of the bathroom and down the hall to his bedroom, and Randy followed.

Crying quietly, Liz pulled a baggy old green sweater over Natalie's raised arms. Natalie sat on the bed in a pair of blue jeans, her pale, swollen feet bare. Her feet had gotten wet when she'd left the funeral home, and again when she'd walked from the pool-house to Kirk's bedroom window, and they had not recovered from it. They had become spongy and bloated. Liz appeared to be dressing a grossly overgrown toddler as she tugged the sweater down over Natalie's head. Once the sweater was on, Liz went to Randy and pressed her face to his neck. He put his arms around her.

Liz turned her head to Kirk and said, "That's not Natalie."

"I know," Kirk said with a nod.

"It's a dead body that doesn't f.u.c.king blink and shouldn't be muh-moving around." She sobbed against Randy's shoulder.

Natalie looked up at Kirk with her filmy eyes and smiled. "Kiss me, Frog Boy," she said.

"This is so f.u.c.king wrong," Liz said. "We've got to do something with her."

"Did you bring some perfume?" Kirk asked.

"Oh, yeah." Liz went to her satchel on the bed and removed a bottle of perfume. "Coco. My grandma gave it to me for my birthday a couple years ago, and I don't like it. But I don't know if it's going to help." She removed the lid from the bottle. "How am I gonna put it on her, 'cause there's no f.u.c.kin'way I'm gonna touch her again." After a moment, she tipped the bottle over Natalie's head and sprinkled the perfume all over her. The perfume's scent was overwhelming in such quant.i.ty, but it only clashed with the smell of rotting flesh, it did not camouflage it. Liz put the perfume bottle back in the satchel.

Kirk said, "Let's get her in the car."

He found a pair of old sneakers in his closet and put them on Natalie's feet, a gray watch cap that covered most of the gash in her forehead. He went into his parents' bedroom and found an old pair of large, round sungla.s.ses his mother used to wear. Back in his bedroom, he put the sungla.s.ses on Natalie and said, "We need to cover as much of her face as possible, just in case someone sees her."

"Even if someone doesn't," Randy muttered.

They hurried Natalie through the house and out the front door, with Liz following and spraying air freshener along the way.

"This is worse than that time you threw up in here, Randy," Liz said as she drove her gray 1996 Toyota Camry up the hill on the road that led to Mrs. Kobylka's house.

"That wasn't even close to this," Randy said. "Besides, I only threw up a little. I didn't cut loose till I got outta the car."

Liz said, "You're hallucinating, because I had a five-dollar scratch-off ticket on the floor and you turned it to mush by drowning it in your puke. It took me forever to get the smell out of here."

"Why the f.u.c.k're you leaving five-dollar scratch-off tickets on the floor of your car?"

"I knew where it was, didn't I?"

In the backseat, Kirk had watched Natalie throughout the ride. Looking at her did not hurt as much as it had at first, now that he was certain it was not Natalie. Sometimes she looked back at him, and sometimes she looked surprised, as if she'd forgotten he was there since the last time she'd looked at him. Once, she'd reached for him and said, "Kiss me, Frog Boy," in that horrible voice. She'd toyed with the seatbelt after Kirk had fastened it. Sometimes her hands fumbled together in her lap. A few times, she'd uttered baby-like nonsense syllables. Kirk hoped her meal would keep her that relaxed and calm for a while. He hoped she would not be getting hungry again very soon.

After leaving the house, Liz had driven to a nearby 7-Eleven. There was a garbage Dumpster against a side wall of the store. Liz had pulled up to the curb and Randy had gotten out and tossed into the Dumpster the bag containing the b.l.o.o.d.y rags and sponge, and the remains of poor Bud. Or Lou.

Bud and Lou had been trying to get out of the house since they'd gotten there. Mom had laid down strict rulesnever leave any doors or windows open that the ferrets could get to, and when entering or leaving the house, always be very careful not to let them out. Kirk would use that. He would play dumb when he got home. It would be concluded eventually that the ferret had gotten outquickly and stealthily, he would say, because he hadn't noticedsometime while Kirk was home, maybe when Randy and Liz were entering or leaving. But it pained Kirk to know how upset Mom would be, how much it would hurt her to lose one of her pets. She loves those d.a.m.ned things, he thought.

Liz made a U-turn at the dead-end of Hilltop Road and stopped the car in front of Mrs. Kobylka's house, behind the old pickup truck.

"Leave the engine running," Kirk said. "I hope I won't be long."

"I'm coming with you," Randy said as he got out of the car. "I wanna get another look at that f.u.c.kin' bird."

It was not raining, but a cold wind blew that made Kirk s.h.i.+ver even though he wore a down jacket. Dark bulging clouds sailed across the morning sky.

Kirk went up the steps to Mrs. Kobylka's porch. His hand was poised to knock on the edge of the screen door when one of the white curtains in the front door's window jerked aside. Her wide eye peered out at him.

"What you want?" she shouted. "I do what you ask for, why you bother me now?"

"You didn't give me what I asked for," Kirk said. "She's still dead, Mrs. Kobylka. I wanted Natalie alive again."

"I do magic, not miracles."

"What am I going to do with her?" Kirk said.

"I told you she would be your responsibility."