9 Tales Told in the Dark 18 Read online

  Licking his lips, he crawled out of the hole, shivering at the wind, and lay on the ground. Stars twinkled like flecks of ice on black velvet. A cloud sailed across the face of the moon, tattered like old cloth.

  Minutes passed. His mind cleared. He remembered being in the car and then...nothing. His memory stopped.

  Sitting up, he rubbed his head and looked around again, figuring his eyes would be adjusted now.

  They were.

  And he saw terrified him.

  Leaning from the shadows like evil spirits, tombstones; tombstones of every description. Some were cracked, some were covered with moss.

  Flesh.

  He jerked around. Though he was sure he had heard someone speak, no one was there.

  A grave, he thought, his breath coming in short bursts. He came from a grave. At the head of the hole, another tombstone.

  He leaned close to read the inscription. JAMES CONWAY: 1944-1961. ASLEEP IN JESUS.

  Horror filled him. He looked at his hands; though dirty, they were whole and warm. They must have buried him alive, just like that Poe story. He must...

  A noise startled him. Spinning around toward the grave next to his, he saw a hand burst from the ground, its fingers long and bony, its skin gray and tattered.

  Flesh. Flesh.

  James got to his feet, the terrible sight holding him transfixed. It was coming out. Jesus Christ, it was coming out!

  It was then that he saw more hands emerging from other graves, all rotting, all blue or black or gray. From the first, a head came through the dirt: James screamed at the ghoulish countenance. Skeletal. Wide, gaping eyes. Jagged teeth. It groaned hollowly as it pulled itself out of the ground.

  Breathing rapidly now, James turned to flee.

  A ghoul was standing behind him, its head slack against its chest. Its face was decomposing, a hole in its cheek. It reached out, touched him with cold hands, and then brushed past him.

  He had to get out of here.

  Moving quickly, he navigated through the cemetery, dodging headstones and reaching hands. A few of them were wandering aimlessly, swaying like tempest tossed trees. Several of them saw him, but ignored him.

  Why aren’t they coming after me?

  He stopped near a crypt half-sunken in the ground. Before the Comics Code all but outlawed horror in comic books, he loved reading Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. In each issue, at least one dead person came out of the ground, and they wanted only one thing: To hurt people. Some had a specific target in mind (a cheating spouse, a killer), but others reveled in simple havoc. Why...?

  It hit him then, and he fell against the side of the crypt.

  Of course.

  They weren’t after him because he was one of them, a ghoul, the living dead, a revenant. He looked at his hands again. They looked normal. He touched his face. Smooth. Unblemished.

  Even so, he was dead.

  Looking up, he saw more of them shambling through the night, moving this way and that, unsteady, unsure.

  Dead.

  Flesh. Flesh. Blood. Food.

  He could hear their thoughts.

  They wanted food.

  Pushing away from the tomb, he started back the way he’d been going. Monsters stepped from behind every headstone, every tree, startling him despite his kinship with them. When he reached the gate, he paused and looked back. There were dozens of them, ambling stupidly about.

  Licking his lips, he ducked through the gate and closed it behind him, letting it latch. Hearing the metallic sound, several of the closest undead turned toward him and started in his direction.

  The gate wouldn’t hold, he knew, but it would buy some time.

  Walking quickly but not running (if he started running, he thought, he would go mad) he crossed a lumpy hillside toward a stand of trees. At the top, he found a dirt road flanking the forest. Looking down, he could see the cemetery.

  It teemed.

  Picking a direction at random, he started walking. Owls hooted from the trees; small animals crashed in the underbrush. He looked several times over his shoulder, certain that he would see an army of the undead behind him, but the road was always empty.

  A half mile away, he heard something in the distance. He stopped, cocked his head, and listened.

  The fence!

  It was already down. They were streaming into the night and they were hungry.

  Jogging now, he followed the road until it came to blacktop two miles later. When he reached it, he realized that he wasn’t even winded.

  The road stood empty. He figured he could wait until a vehicle came along and try to hitch a ride, but he didn’t have that kind of time. Those...things were about. He had to warn people.

  Looking back once more, he started along the shoulder of the road. From the narrowness, he inferred that it wasn’t the main highway, but a service road of some kind.

  A mile later, the road opened up, and a small lot flanked the left side. Looking due west, he could see a lake, and the full, bulbous moon sitting high above it. Closer, a car sat in one of the half-dozen slots, its engine idling and its taillights glowing.

  Two things came to him at once: One...he knew this place. Lovers’ Lane. A pang of...loss (?) rippled through his stomach, and he almost collapsed in melancholia.

  The second thing: The car...it was so strange. Low and sleek. Coming forward, he could almost swear that it was some sort of space craft.

  But that was crazy. Aliens didn’t exist, not really.

  Having risen from the dead, he suddenly wasn’t so sure.

  Remembering the task at hand, he went up to the car’s back window and peered in. A dark form sat in the drivers’ seat. Another, smaller, shape occupied the passenger side.

  James opened the back door and slipped in behind the driver. The passenger, a woman with long blonde hair, looked at him, her eyes going wide.

  “What the fuck?” the driver, a man, asked.

  “We have to get out of here,” James blurted, his voice shaky. “Something really bad’s happening.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” the man asked. He half –turned in his seat. In the soft green glow emanating from the dashboard, James could see that he was young, nineteen, twenty. His hair was lank against his forehead, his nose small and fat, his chin sharp and angular.

  “I’m James,” James said. “I’m sorry, and I know it’s crazy, but something really bad is happening, and we need to get out of here now.”

  The boy opened his mouth to reply, but the woman (a girl, really) cut him off. “What’s happening?”

  James started to tell her, but stopped. They would never believe him. They would think he was crazy, kick him out, and then go on to die and the hands of the ghouls.

  “There are bad people in the woods. They’re trying to kill me.”

  “What kind of bad people?” the boy asked, his voice dripping with incredulousness.

  James looked over his shoulder and started.

  They were already starting to come out of the woods, waddling from side-to-side in the shadows like bloodthirsty penguins.

  “Those!”

  The boy, shooting his arm back behind the girl’s seat, strained for a better look.

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know, let’s go!”

  “Ian,” the girl said nervously. She was looking in the rearview mirror.

  They were coming into the road now.

  “Come on!” James shouted, turning.

  Ian seemed to come alive. He looked at James, then back out the window. “Alright.”

  He turned around, threw the car in reverse, and backed up, clipping one of the ghouls and knocking it to the ground. Others slapped the hood and appeared at the windows. Some went for the door handles.

  The girl screamed.

  One of them pulled open the back passenger door. James leaned over the seat, punched the ghoul’s reaching arm as hard as he could, and pulled the door closed, locking it. Only then did he see
the thing’s arm, from elbow to fingertips, lying on the leather seat. Revulsion rose within him, and he swept it into the shadows of the foot well.

  “What the fuck?” Ian screamed. He slammed on the gas, and the car shot back, taking three ghouls out of the equation. Spinning the wheel, he started south, cutting across the parking lot and getting onto the road. One of the things held fast to Ian’s door-handle, its face mashed against the glass.

  “Holy shit, man, holy shit!”

  James went to roll down the window so he could punch the thing in the face, but he couldn’t find the crank. He felt along the door paneling, but it was nowhere.

  On the open road, Ian stamped on the gas and the car rocketed forward; the ghoul let go and tumbled to the ground.

  “Who are they?” the girl was asking. She strained in her seat, trying to see through the back window. Her face was wide and frightened.

  “The living dead,” James said; he didn’t realize he was admitting it until he heard the words pass through his lips.

  “Like zombies?” Ian asked. He glanced up at the mirror.

  “Yeah, kinda,” James said.

  “Oh my god,” the girl said. “Oh my god. Oh my...”

  “Brandi,” Ian said, “shut up.”

  They were flying through the night. The trees flanking either side of the road were inky blurs.

  “We have to go into Winslow,” James said. “Tell the police. Warn people.”

  Ian didn’t reply.

  They came to the end of the road shortly thereafter. On either side, the main highway stretched into forever. Ian turned left, the headlights splashing across a green road sign: WINSLOW 2MI.

  He didn’t remember the sign being there.

  Brandi was whimpering quietly in the passenger seat. Ian kept glancing up at the mirror, looking at him, James figured.

  “What were you doing out there?” he asked.

  “Fishing,” James lied. “I was fishing. They came out of the woods and started chasing me. I almost didn’t make it.”

  The road sloped down, and suddenly lights appeared in the distance. From here, it continued downward before crossing Potato Creek via the Eisenhower Bridge. It was newly-built when he...must have died.

  The thought hit him like a punch.

  Dead.

  He was dead.

  He didn’t feel like it, and glancing in the mirror, he certainly didn’t look like it, but he was.

  How long?

  What year was it? It couldn’t be 1961. The car looked like nothing he had ever seen. It was surely a product of the future.

  Were his parents still alive?

  He sat up straight. What if they were? They were in danger!

  He’d call them from the police station, he figured. Warn them.

  God, he hoped they were still alive.

  He suddenly wanted to see them very much.

  When James died, the sheriff of Raintree County was George Coverdale, a big, fat man with a white mustache. In the future, it was a small, thin man with a balding head. His name, he said, was Mark Robinson.

  Robinson sat with his arms folded while Ian told how they escaped from the “zombies.” Robinson, seeming even smaller behind the clutter piling his desk, listened politely, nodding his head but furrowing his brows here and there. James repeated the lie about being attacked while fishing. He spotted a calendar behind Robinson’s head. It was open to October 2016.

  Two-thousand-sixteen.

  James was staggered. He had been dead for fifty-five years. Fifty-five years!

  Surely his parents were gone. They would both be over a hundred if they were alive. He was bitterly disappointed, but glad as well: They weren’t in any danger.

  They’re probably walking around with the others.

  That thought, sudden and uninvited, disturbed him.

  Why didn’t I rot?

  He didn’t know. He wracked his brain for an answer, but if there was one, he didn’t have it. By all rights, he should be nothing but bone. How he escaped decomposition for fifty-five years boggled his mind. He’d heard of bodies being preserved for up to a thousand years in the right climate, but even they looked dead.

  He didn’t.

  Fifty-five years!

  He kept returning to that. How had the world changed since 1961? Was the Cold War still on? Did people still listen to records, or was there something else, something new?

  And what was that thing on Robinson’s desk?

  Roughly the size of a microwave over, it had a screen and what looked like a typewriter keyboard in front of it. Wires ran from it to the wall. Leaning to one side, he saw a black box sitting against the side of the desk. Lights glowed on it.

  “You alright, son?” Robinson asked.

  James looked up. The sheriff was watching him.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” James said, though he wasn’t.

  Robinson sighed and shook his head. James couldn’t help but note that the man’s uniform was roughly the same as Coverdale’s: Light brown with dark brown patches over the breast pockets.

  “I’m an open-minded man,” Robinson said presently. “I really am. But this...zombie stuff...you can see why I’m having a hard time, right?”

  He spat the word “zombie” as though it tasted foul.

  “I know it’s crazy,” James said. “Maybe it’s not zombies. Maybe they’re escaped mental patients. I don’t know. But there are bad people out there and they’re coming this way.”

  Just then the door opened and a deputy poked his head in. “Mark, we got some kids out here saying they woke the dead.”

  Ian and Brandi looked at each other. Robinson’s brow furrowed.

  Past the deputy, James could see a group of teenagers standing at a counter. Two boys, two girls. One of the girls was a Negro.

  “I’m coming,” Robinson sighed, getting to his feet.

  “See?” Ian said. “They’re saying the same thing we are!”

  Robinson lifted a hand. “Just...chill out and stay here.”

  The sheriff brushed past James and followed the deputy. James went to the door and watched as the kids excitedly talked to him, making wild gestures this way and that. Robinson listened impassively, his hands on his hips.

  “...a barrel,” the Negro girl was saying. “We tried to move it and gas started leaking out.”

  “This shit’s fucking nuts,” Ian said. He was standing by the desk, rubbing his face.

  “They started coming out of the ground,” one of the boys was saying. He was tall and solidly-built. Probably a football player.

  The other boy, short and chubby, held up his hands but everyone was talking at once, so James was unable to hear what he was saying.

  Barrel. Gas.

  “I saw them too.”

  James was in the hall now. The kids looked at him, and Robinson shot him a withering glance. James didn’t care. He was already dead. What could Mark Robinson do to him?

  “You were there?” the fat boy asked.

  “No,” James said, “I was...fishing when they came out of the woods and started chasing me. What did you do?”

  “It wasn’t our fault,” the second girl said. She was white with black hair. “We didn’t know...”

  “What did you do?”

  “We found a barrel in the cemetery,” the Negro girl said. “When we tried to move it, some kind of gas shot out.”

  Robinson was shaking his head. He had lost control and he knew it.

  “What were you doing in the cemetery?” James asked.

  “Hanging out,” the football player said. “We weren’t doing anything wrong...” “Look!” Robinson said sharply. “I’ve had enough of this nonsense. I...”

  A female deputy leaned over the counter. “I hate to break this up, but we just got a call from Chestnut Street. 10-19.”

  James’s heart sputtered. “10-19? What’s that?”

  “Disturbance,” the woman said.

  Disturbance?

  They were here. I
n town. Already.

  Robinson, his shoulders slumped, threw his hands up. “What, is it a full moon? Jensen, come on.”

  Before he could go, James grabbed his shoulder. “Sheriff! You’re gonna need a lot more than two men; they’ll tear you apart.”

  Robinson pulled away from his grasp. “If you don’t shut up I’ll tear you apart.”

  When he was gone, James turned to the teens. “What did this barrel look like?”

  “It was green,” the fat boy said. “With yellow writing.”

  “Something about the US Government,” the girl with black hair added.

  Government!

  He thought back to the movies he had seen where atomic tests left bugs a hundred times their normal size.

  “Why did you touch it?”

  No one had a good answer.

  Mark Robinson pulled onto Chestnut Street and gasped. In the headlights, two, three, hell, four dozen people staggered through the street, with others ambling across front lawns, clawing at doors and windows.

  In the passenger seat, Tony Jensen inhaled over clenched teeth. “Wow.”

  A man darted into the street screaming, but a couple of the hooligans grabbed him and brought him down.

  “Come on!”

  He threw the door open and got out, withdrawing his gun from its holster. “Freeze!” he yelled, bringing it up.

  The man shrieked. It was a sound of horror and agony. What were they doing to him?

  “FREEZE!”

  Several of the rioters turned toward him and started his way. He fired into the group over the man, hitting one in the back. It jerked, but didn’t go down.

  “Mark,” Tony said. He sounded worried.

  Robinson turned. Three of them were coming toward Tony. Ten, fifteen feet. In the spill of a streetlamp, he could see their faces.

  They weren’t human.

  Or if they had been human, they were human no longer.

  His blood ran cold.

  Those kids were right. Zombies. Fucking zombies.

  Tony took up a shooter’s stance and fired at the closest ghoul. The bullet struck it in the shoulder, half-turning it. His second round smashed into another’s forehead.

  Neither fell.