Z- Zombie Stories Read online

  Z: Zombie Stories

  Edited by

  J.M. Lassen

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Z: Zombie Stories

  © 2011 by J. M. Lassen

  This edition of Z: Zombie Stories

  © 2011 by Night Shade Books

  Edited by J.M. Lassen

  Cover art by David Palumbo

  Interior illustrations by Rebecca Silvers

  Cover design, Interior layout

  and design by Amy Popovich

  An extension of this copyright page can be found

  on pages 295-296

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-312-0

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-313-7

  Night Shade Books

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  FAMILY

  BUSINESS

  JONATHAN MABERRY

  I

  Benny Imura couldn’t hold a job, so he took to killing.

  It was the family business. He barely liked his family—and by family, that meant his older brother Tom—and he definitely didn’t like the idea of “business.” Or work. The only part of the deal that sounded like it might be fun was the actual killing.

  He’d never done it before. Sure, he’d gone through a hundred simulations in gym class and in the Scouts, but they never let kids do any real killing. Not before they hit fifteen.

  “Why not?” he once asked his Scoutmaster, a fat guy named Feeney, who used to be a TV weatherman back in the day.

  “Because killing’s the sort of thing you should learn from your folks,” said Feeney.

  “I don’t have any folks,” Benny countered. “My mom and dad died on First Night.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Feeney, then quickly amended that. “Oh, heck. Sorry, Benny—I didn’t know that. Point is, you got family of some kind, right?”

  “I guess. I got ‘I’m Mr. Freaking Perfect Tom Imura’ for a brother, and I don’t want to learn anything from him.”

  Feeney had stared at him. “Wow. I didn’t know you were related to him. Your brother, huh? Well, there’s your answer, kid. Nobody better to teach you the art of killing than a professional killer like Tom Imura.” Feeney paused and licked his lips nervously. “I guess, being his brother and all, you’ve seen a lot of killing.”

  “No,” Benny said, with huge annoyance.”He never lets me watch!”

  “Ask him when you turn thirteen. A lot of kids get to watch when they hit their teens.”

  Benny had asked, and Tom had said no. Again. It wasn’t a discussion. Just, “No.”

  That was two years ago, and now Benny was six weeks past his fifteenth birthday. He had four more weeks’ grace to find a paying job before county ordinance cut his rations by half. Benny hated being in that position, and if one more person gave him the “Fifteen and Free” speech, he was going to scream. He hated that as much as when people saw someone doing hard work and they said crap like, “Damn, he’s going at that like he’s fifteen and out of food.”

  Like it was something to be happy about. Something to be proud of. Working your butt off for the rest of your life. Benny didn’t see where the fun was in that.

  His buddy, Chong, said it was a sign of the growing cultural oppression that was driving humanity toward acceptance of a slave state. Benny had no freaking idea what Chong meant, or if there was even meaning in anything he said. But he nodded in agreement because the look on Chong’s face always made it seem like he knew exactly what was what.

  At home, before he even finished eating his birthday cake, Tom had said, “If I want to talk about you joining the family business, are you going to chew my head off?”

  Benny stared venomous death at Tom and said, very clearly and distinctly, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Work. In. The. Family. Business.”

  “I’ll take that as a no, then.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little late now to try and get me all excited about it? I asked you a zillion times to—”

  “You asked me to take you out on kills.”

  “Right! And every time I did you—”

  “There’s a lot more to what I do, Benny.”

  “Yeah, there probably is, and maybe I would have thought the rest was something I could deal with, but you never let me see the cool stuff.”

  “There’s nothing ‘cool’ about killing,” Tom said sharply.

  “There is when you’re talking about killing zoms!” Benny fired back. That stalled the conversation. Tom stalked out of the room and banged around in the kitchen for a while, and Benny threw himself down on the couch.

  Tom and Benny never talked about zombies. They had every reason to, but they never did. Benny couldn’t understand it. He hated zoms. Everyone hated them, though with Benny it was a white-hot, consuming hatred that went back to his very first memory—a nightmare image that was there every night when he closed his eyes. It was an image that was seared into him, even though it was something he had seen as a tiny child.

  Dad and Mom.

  Mom screaming, running toward Tom, shoving a squirming Benny—all of eighteen months—into Tom’s arms. Screaming and screaming. Telling him to run.

  While the thing that had been Dad pushed its way through the bedroom door, which Mom had tried to block with a chair and lamps and anything else she could find.

  Benny remembered his mom screaming words, but the memory was so old and he had been so young that he didn’t remember what any of them were. Maybe there were no words. Maybe it was just her screaming.

  Benny remembered the wet heat on his face as Tom’s tears fell on him when he climbed out of the bedroom window. They had lived in a ranch-style house. One story. The window emptied out into a yard that was pulsing with red and blue police lights. There were more shouts and screams. The neighbors. The cops. Maybe the army. Benny thought it was the army. And the constant popping sounds of gunfire, near and far away.

  But of all of it, Benny remembered a single, last image. As Tom clutched him to his chest, Benny looked over his brother’s shoulder at the bedroom window. Mom leaned out of the window screaming at them as Dad’s pale hands reached out of the shadows of the room and dragged her back out of sight.

  That was Benny’s oldest memory. If there had been older memories, then that image had burned them away. Benny remembered the hammering sound that was Tom’s panicked heartbeat vibrating against his own chest, and the long wail that was his own inarticulate cry for his mom and his dad.

  He hated Tom for running away. He hated that Tom hadn’t stayed and helped Mom. He hated what their Dad had become on that First Night all those years ago. And he hated what Dad had turned Mom into.

  In his mind they were no longer Mom and Dad. They were the things that had killed them. Zoms. And he hated them with an intensity that made the sun feel cold and small.

  A few years ago, when he found out that Tom was a zombie hunter, Benny hadn’t been proud of his brother. As far as he was concerned, if Tom really had what it took to be a zombie hunter, he’d have had the guts to help Mom. Instead, Tom had run away and left Mom to die. To become one of them.

  Tom came back into the living room, looked at the remains of Benny’s birthday cake on the table, then looked at Benny on the couch.

  “The offer still stands,” he said. “If you want to do what I do, then I’ll take you on as an apprentice. I’ll sign the papers so you can still get full rations.”

  Benny gave him a long, withering stare.

  “I’d rather be eaten by zoms than have you as my boss,” Benny said.

  Tom sighed, turned, and trudged upstairs. After that they didn’t talk to each other for days.

  II


  The following weekend Benny and Lou Chong had picked up the Saturday edition of the Town Pump because it had the biggest helpwanted section, and over the next several weeks, they applied for anything that sounded easy.

  Benny and Chong clipped out a bunch of want ads and tackled them one at a time, having first categorized them by “most possible money,” “coolness,” and “I don’t know what it is but it sounds okay.” They passed on anything that sounded bad right from the get-go.

  The first on their list was “Locksmith Apprentice.”

  That sounded okay, but it turned out to be humping a couple of heavy toolboxes from house to house at the crack of frigging dawn while an old German guy who could barely speak English repaired fence locks and installed dial combinations on both sides of bedroom doors and installed bars and wire grilles.

  It was kind of funny watching the old guy explain to his customers how to use the combination locks. Benny and Chong began making bets on how many times per conversation a customer would say “What? Could you repeat that?” or “Beg pardon?”

  The work was important, though. Everyone had to lock themselves in their rooms at night and then use a combination to get out. Or a key; some people still locked with keys. That way, if they died in their sleep, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the room and attack the rest of the family. There had been whole settlements wiped out because someone’s grandfather popped off in the middle of the night and then started chowing down on the kids and grandkids.

  Zoms can’t work a combination lock. They can’t work keys either. The German guy installed double-sided locks, so that the doors could be opened from the other side in a real, nonzombie emergency; or if the town security guys had to come in and do a cleanup on a new zom.

  Somehow, Benny and Chong had gotten it into their heads that locksmiths got to see this stuff, but the old guy said that he hadn’t seen a single living dead that was in any way connected to his job. Boring.

  To make it worse, the German guy paid them a little more than pocket lint and said that it would take three years to learn the actual trade. That meant that Benny wouldn’t even pick up a screwdriver for six months and wouldn’t do anything but carry stuff for a year. Screw that.

  “I thought you didn’t want to actually work,” said Chong, as they walked away from the German with no intention of returning in the morning.

  “I don’t. But I don’t want to be bored out of my freaking mind either.”

  Next on their list was “Fence Tester.”

  That was a little more interesting because there were actual zoms on the other side of the fence. Benny wanted to get close to one. He’d never been closer than a hundred yards from an active zom before. The older kids said that if you looked into a zom’s eyes, your reflection would show you how you’d look as one of the living dead. That sounded very cool, but he never got the chance for a close-up look, because there was always a guy with a shotgun dogging him all through the shift.

  The shotgun guy got to ride a horse. Benny and Chong had to walk the fence line and stop every six or ten feet, grip the chain links, and shake the fence to make sure there were no breaks or rusted weak spots. That was okay for the first mile, but after that the noise attracted the zoms, and by the middle of the third mile he had to grab, shake, and release pretty damn fast to keep his fingers from getting bitten. He wanted a close-up look, but he didn’t want to lose a finger over it. If he got bit, the shotgun guy would blast him on the spot. Depending, a zom bite could turn someone from healthy to living dead in anything from a few hours to a few minutes, and in orientation, they told everyone that there was a zero-tolerance policy on infections.

  “If the gun bulls even think you got nipped, they’ll blow you all to hell and gone,” said the trainer, “so be careful!” They quit at lunch.

  Next morning they went to the far side of town and applied as “Fence Technicians.”

  The fence ran for hundreds of miles and encircled the town and the harvested fields, so this meant a lot of walking, mostly carrying yet another grumpy old guy’s toolbox. In the first three hours they got chased by a zom who had squeezed through a break in the fence.

  “Why don’t they just shoot all the zoms who come up to the fence?” Benny asked their supervisor.

  “’Cause folks would get upset,” said the man, a scruffy-looking guy with bushy eyebrows and a tic at the corner of his mouth. “Some of them zoms are relatives of folks in town, and those folks have rights regarding their kin. Been all sorts of trouble about it, so we keep the fence in good shape, and every once in a while one of the townsfolk will suck up enough intestinal fortitude to grant permission for the fence guards to do what’s necessary.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Benny.

  “That’s people,” said the supervisor.

  That afternoon Benny and Chong were sure they’d walked a million miles, had been peed on by a horse, stalked by a horde of zoms—Benny couldn’t see anything at all in their dusty eyes—and yelled at by nearly everyone.

  At the end of the day, as they trudged home on aching feet, Chong said, “That was about as much fun as getting beaten up in recess.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “No… getting beaten up is more fun.”

  Benny didn’t have the energy to argue.

  There was only one opening for the next job—“Carpet-Coat Salesman”—which was okay because Chong wanted to stay home and rest his feet. Chong hated walking. So Benny showed up neatly dressed in his best jeans and a clean T-shirt and with his hair as combed as it would ever get without glue.

  There wasn’t much danger in selling carpet coats, but Benny wasn’t slick enough to get the patter down. Benny was surprised that they’d be hard to sell, because everybody had a carpet coat or two. Best thing in the world to have on if some zoms were around and feeling bitey. What he discovered, though, was that everyone who could thread a needle was selling them, so the competition was fierce and sales were few and far between. The door-to-door guys worked on straight commission, too.

  The lead salesman, a greasy joker named Chick, would have Benny wear a long-sleeved carpet coat—low knap for summer, shag for winter—and then would use a device on him that was supposed to simulate the full-strength bite of an adult male zom. This metal “biter” couldn’t break the skin through the coat—and here Chick rolled into his spiel about human bite strength, throwing around terms like PSI, avulsion, and post-decay dental-ligament strength—but it pinched really hard, and the coat was so hot the sweat ran down inside Benny’s clothes. When he went home that night, he weighed himself to see how many pounds he’d sweated off. Just one, but Benny didn’t have a lot of pounds to spare.

  “This one looks good,” said Chong over breakfast the next morning. Benny read, “‘Pit Thrower.’ What’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” Chong said, with a mouthful of toast. “I think it has something to do with barbecuing.’’

  It didn’t. Pit Throwers worked in teams to drag dead zoms off the back of carts and toss them into the constant blaze at the bottom of Brinkers Quarry. Most of the zoms on the carts were in pieces. The woman who ran orientation kept talking about “parts” and went on and on about the risk of secondary infection; then she pasted on the fakest smile Benny had ever seen and tried to sell the applicants on the physical-fitness benefits that came from constant lifting, turning, and throwing. She even pulled up her sleeve and flexed her biceps. She had pale skin with freckles that looked like liver spots, and the sudden pop of her biceps looked like a swollen tumor.

  Chong faked vomiting into his lunch bag.

  The other jobs offered by the quarry included “Ash Soaker”—“Because we don’t want zom smoke drifting over the town, now do we?” asked the freckly muscle freak. And “Pit Raker,” which was exactly what it sounded like.

  Benny and Chong didn’t make it through orientation. They snuck out during the slide show of smiling Pit Throwers handling gray limbs and heads.

  “Spotter”
was next, and that proved to be a good choice, but only for one of them. Benny’s eyesight was too poor to spot zoms at the right distance. Chong was like an eagle, and they offered him a job as soon as he finished reading numbers off a chart. Benny couldn’t even tell they were numbers.

  Chong took the job, and Benny walked away alone, throwing dispirited looks back at his friend sitting next to his trainer in a high tower.

  Later, Chong told Benny that he loved the job. He sat there all day staring out over the valleys into the Rot and Ruin that stretched from California all the way to the Atlantic. Chong said that he could see twenty miles on a clear day, especially if there were no winds coming his way from the quarry. Just him up there, alone with his thoughts. Benny missed his friend, but privately he thought that the job sounded more boring than words could express.

  Benny liked the sound of “Bottler” because he figured it for a factory job filling soda bottles. Benny loved soda, but it was sometimes hard to come by. But as he walked up the road, he met an older teenager—his pal Morgie Mitchell’s cousin Bert—who worked at the plant.

  When Benny fell into step with Bert, he almost gagged. Bert smelled awful, like something found dead behind the baseboards. Worse. He smelled like a zom.

  Bert caught his look and shrugged. “Well, what do you expect me to smell like? I bottle this stuff eight hours a day.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Cadaverine. I work a press to get the oils from the rotting meat.” Benny’s heart sank. Cadaverine was a nasty-smelling molecule produced by protein hydrolysis during putrefaction of animal tissue. Benny remembered that from science class, but he didn’t know that it was made from actual rotting flesh. Hunters and trackers dabbed it on their clothes to keep the zoms from coming after them, because the dead were not attracted to rotting flesh.