http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8899597/4/Meg-And-Greg
"Wow," said Phil,
"I was starting to wonder if anybody was still out there. Hey, can I
get you anything? I know where there's some food..."
"Where were you?" Carlos said sternly.
"There's
storage sheds in back, an' old Pete's place," said Phil. "I've been
keeping time in an old trailer, out in the junkyard. They don't come
back there much, though there's this crazy cop comes by sometimes."
Carlos
waved to the Dodge on the lift. "The cop isn't going anywhere any more.
Hold on... you said crazy. Don't you know what's going on?"
"I
heard some stories," Phil said guardedly. "I didn't know what to think.
Nobody did. Then a couple weeks ago, that Bug drove in, a woman with a
guy who was busted up, and the cop came when Junior called for help. I
hardly saw anything. I was busy trying to handle this crazy back
order... Somebody wanted a transmission part for this completely obscure
European model, the company that made it hasn't existed for,
like, thirty years ago. Obviously, the owners should have been scrapped
years ago, but Jonny told me, it's not our job to tell the customers
what to do... Anyway, I heard the screams. I was in here, and Jon came
out, jumped in that truck and told me to raise the lift and get in. So I
did, only Jonny wouldn't let me in. Then I saw Art run out of the
garage for the cop's car, and the cop came out and just shot him. So I just ran like hell..."
"Probably the best thing you could have done," Carlos said. "Hold on. Trouble." Down the path came five more shufflers.
"What are they?" Meg asked. "I mean, really."
"Your
guess is good as any," Carlos said. "But if you're asking for a name,
`kudlak' is good as any. It's a word from Yugoslavia for what we would
call a vampire. That's where all this started, or at least the first
place where the rest of the world heard about it. The Yugoslavs gave two
stories, one on top of the other. First they said that there were
`panics' in isolated areas where people still believed in kudlaks:
Bodies were bein' dug up an' destroyed, just like in the movies, only it
was getting' out of hand. Then they announced that this time- and who
knows 'bout the other times?- dead bodies really were getting up,
walking around, and attacking the living. Not that anybody believed 'em,
until bodies started walking out of the morgues in Budapest."
He
paced to the left, drawing a kudlak after him. "The first reports said
they could be killed by a shot to the head. They were wrong, and anybody
who knew anything about the brain should have known better. The human
brain is kinda like that VW. The steering- what you'd call human
intelligence- is up front. But plain old regular people survive major
trauma there all the time." He struck the kudlak across the temple. It
fell face down, and after a short time, started to rise. "That's 'cause
the power- balance, heart beat, reflexes- is all in back. Most every
animal that's ever lived has got by on hardly nothin' else, an' so can
they." He drove the point of the hammer into the base of the skull.
"Bottom line, you hit them just anywhere in the head, then sure, they
fall down. Hit 'em in the hind brain or the spinal cord, an' then they stay down."
Meg
shuddered involuntarily. She suddenly experienced the most vivid
recollection of a moment that had seemed blacked out of her
consciousness: Aiming the magnum at Greg, pulling the trigger, seeing
the spurt of blood... from his temple.
The rest of the shufflers
went straight for Carlos. Meg reached for her magnum, but Carlos only
grinned and twirled the hammer. As the nearest stretched out, a voice
Meg had never heard before called out in words she had never heard
before either. The shuffler turned its head, to a man of at least 50
with a face that could only belong to an Indian. The Indian spoke again,
quieter but still loud and no less firm, repeating one sentence or so
over and over again. Meg could not guess what language the words were
from, let alone what they meant. She might have taken some comfort in
knowing that the handful of ethnologists who had heard a few meager
snatches of the same tongue had been equally at a loss to comprehend or
even classify it.
The point of Carlos's hammer caught the shuffler
in the ear. It dropped immediately. The rest shuffled indecisively,
first toward the Indian and then toward Carlos, while the Indian went
through more languages, including a snatch of one she thought she
recognized (in fact, correctly) as Navajo. "If you don't get the brain
stem or the spine, the ear's the next best thing. There's little bones
in there, and they work like teeny little gyroscopes. Take out even one
ear, and balance is shot." He drove the point of the hammer into the
back of the skull. "That's what happened to the one that was crawling
around. He did better than most; usually, they don't even make it
upright again."
The Indian had got to Spanish: "Su es muerte! Vaya con los muertos!" Then English: "You dead! You belong dead! Go to the dead!"
Meg stared, and Carlos gave her an understanding look. "You think this is crazy?" he said. "I'll tell you what's really crazy: I've seen it work."
He cheerfully struck down the hindmost, jerking it back with the point
in its brain like a shepherd hooking a sheep. Meg sprinted to the
Indian's side as he drew the shufflers down the path.
"You! Hey you!" she said. "Over here! I'm talking to you!"
The shufflers came faster. The Indian gave her a venomous glare. "Quiet! No talk to dead!" Then he thrust something into her hand and ordered, "Hold this." She was surprised enough to comply. It was a lighter.
The
Indian took out a bow and an arrow. He thrust the arrow at her.
"Light." The lighter was unfamiliar to her, a metal-shelled specimen
from her grandfather's days. But it lit at the first try, and she
touched the flame gingerly to a wad of rags around the arrow's tip. She
had scarcely done that before the bowstring twanged and a shuffler went
up like a water balloon filled with gasoline.
The burning shuffler
froze in place, howling as it burned and finally collapsing. The last,
already nearer, broke into a loping stride, straight for Meg. The Indian
stepped right in front of her, shouting in the first language he had
used, this time only a single phrase. The shuffler backed up a pace, and
the Indian took back his lighter and waved it in its face. The lolling
head went stiffly back and forth. Then the Indian stepped aside and
dragged Med with him, just before the better part of the kudlak's head
disappeared at the roar of the 12-gauge.
"You did no have to do
that," the Indian said to Carlos, who crouched at the end of the path.
"Make a lot of noise. Could bring more. Could hit us."
"Oi fired
up, an' it was taller than you," Carlos said. He pointed to the other
kudlak, still burning merrily. "'Sides, 'e didn't 'sactly go quietly,
did he? Speakin' of..." Just down the road, three more shufflers had
stopped, and two were turning around. Four more were approaching from
the other direction. Then, from out of the bushes a few feet away,
another rose. It had a large wound in its temple, from Meg's magnum.
Carlos blew its head off with his remaining shell, and then retreated.
"What's your name?" Meg said to the Indian as they followed.
"Joe."
"Indian Joe?" She shook her head, trying to keep Mark Twain from her mind. "What's your last name?"
"Johnson."
Two
kudlaks had reached the path. Carlos unlimbered his 20-gauge and fired
at the nearest kudlak, still more than 60 feet away. The range was a bit
long for a shotgun, but the load was a slug that carried far enough to
wing a cactus 200 feet away. Carlos fired another shot, and the other
kudlak staggered and fell with a round in the chest. He pumped the gun
for another shot, but the shuffler's path had put the damaged pump in
the line of fire. "That's it," he said. "Time for the cavalry!" He
pulled out a radio and said, "George, we're ready, but come in hot!"
From
back at the turn-off, there was a whine of an engine, and a great cloud
of dust. Carlos took a shot and felled the nearest shuffler between the
pumps. Three more were headed down the path, while the one he had shot
was getting to its feet. Another stood at the mouth of the path, looking
back. Then the whine of the engine grew louder, and an amazing
vehicular apparition rolled into view.
It was a boxy but
streamlined van, painted in shades of yellow with a reddish-orange roof
and trim. It looked like a VW Bus except for a grill that clearly
indicated a front-engine vehicle, and bore the shape of a silver smiley
face, and a clearly-modified roof gave it a humpbacked look vaguely like
a buffalo Carlos winced as the van mowed down the hindmost shuffler.
"You can't get parts by mail order no more," he said to nobody in
particular.
Three young men instantly piled out of the camper van.
The first, lanky, shirtless and armed with an aluminum bat, bounded out
of the rear door, while the other two hustled out of the double doors
in the side, one armed with a pick axe and another with a shovel. The
pair teamed up to dispatch the kudlak getting to its feet, while their
companion sprinted forward. One shuffler turned a hollow clong,
just in time to catch the bat across knee cap. An upward swing caught it
in the ear as it fell. The shirtless young man whooped and laughed,
then swore in surprise more than concern when the last shuffler pivoted
and came at him straight over its fellow. The shuffler on its feet
tripped over the other as it started to rise from the ground. The young
man simply stepped back and struck, again and again. Behind him, the
team were struggling to dislodge the pick axe from the skull of the
first zombie he had felled. Meanwhile the other shuffler at his feet was
its way out from under the one he was vigorously beating and back to
its hands and knees. Then the duo caught up, and one blow each finished
the shuffler.
Two young woman emerged from the camper, one tall
and athletic and the other short and leaning toward pudgy. The shuffler
struck by the Thing was nearly at their feet, its back clearly broken:
Its hands clawed the ground furiously and clutched for the a shapely
leg, but the rest of its body hardly budged. The pudgy one struck it
with a snow shovel, and then gripped the spur-shaped end of the handle
to drive the edge straight downward into its neck. One final shuffler,
having held back through the melee, turned around and started shuffling
the other way. That was when a bearded, balding, grandfatherly man
stepped out of the cab, and pulled a very long-handled shovel with a
narrow, spade-like blade from a rack on the side of the roof extension
The shuffler sped up as the older man followed, and it looked as if it
would outpace its pursuer. Then the old man put on a little more speed,
and suddenly thrust the shovel like a polearm. For a moment, the
shuffler's feet scuffed in place. Then the man jerked back the shovel,
and the shuffler dropped with its head nearly severed.
David N. Brown
Mesa Arizona
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