A collection of zombie stories by best-selling author Scott Nicholson, including the never-before-published “A Farewell to Arms.” Includes a short story by Jack Kilborn and a survival scorecard by Jonathan Maberry. Bonus material includes the script for the Murdermouth comic book.

Murdermouth:

Zombie Bits

By Scott Nicholson

Copyright ©2010 Scott Nicholson

Published by Haunted Computer Books at Smashwords

www.HauntedComputer.com

Follow Scott: www.twitter.com/hauntedcomputer

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. A Farewell to Arms

2. Bleeding Ink

3. Need

4. Carnival Knowledge

5. Murdermouth

6. Eat Me

7. A Matter of Taste (Jack Kilborn)

8. The Meek

9. Comic script: Murdermouth #1

10. Zombie Apocalypse Survival Scorecard (Jonathan Maberry)

11. You’ll Never Walk Alone

About the author

Other books by Scott Nicholson

INTRODUCTION

Zombies.

Gotta love ‘em.

My first exposure to zombies was in those old EC and 1970’s horror comics, the ones with the short, garish tales with a twist at the end that was never all that surprising. House of Mystery, Tales from the Crypt, Weird War Tales, I gobbled them up as fast as I could collect drink bottles on the side of the road. Back then, three or four drink bottles could get you a comic book or pack of baseball cards. That’s hard to believe now.

Which is one of many reasons I think the apocalypse has already happened and we just don’t know it yet.

But zombies really staggered into my life when I saw Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie.” I was a freshman in college, with a little cash and independence, making my own decisions for a change. Not good.

I went to the movie by myself, for whatever reason. And I sat there alternately horrified and fascinated. I was most captivated by the persistence of the zombies—that “Never say die” attitude and the way they kept coming no matter how many limbs they lost.

Driven by a single, simple purpose.

Really, I guess that encapsulated the whole zombie love affair for me—it cut everything down to survival of the fittest, nature at its most basic. Kill or be killed. Live to be eaten another day.

Of course, volumes of academic hoo-hockery have been written about the zombie as social metaphor, but that one works for me.

I went back, again by myself, and watched Fulci’s “Zombie” the next night. I did cover my eyes at one point, but obviously the addiction was strong. To this day, it is the only movie I have ever watched back-to-back like that.

And that’s saying something, considering “Night of the Living Dead” is one of my all-time favorite movies of any kind. Besides the taunting “They’re coming to get you, Bahhh-bara!,” there is not a single laugh in that whole Romero classic. It takes itself deadly seriously, which is fairly rare in modern horror films and books.

My early attempts at zombie fiction were from the first-person viewpoint of the zombie, imagining some vestige of humanity inside those shambling, ravenous creatures. They are the Other, but they are us.

And it’s that otherness that I love to explore in fiction, how we relate to one another as human beings and how that gets challenged—in “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” there is the usual survival scenario that explores people under pressure, but also sneaks in a twisted version of a boy’s faith. “Bleeding Ink” is informed by my real-life profession as a reporter, and how we’d probably respond to an undead attack. “Need,” “Carnival Knowledge” and “Murdermouth” are related stories that hinge on the “turning” and how zombies might view the Other—when humans are the Other.

And, of course, zombies lend themselves to humorous treatment, as seen in the zombie-sheep tale “The Meek,” “Eat Me,” and Jack Kilborn’s “A Matter of Taste.”

Zombie superstar Jonathan Maberry (Patient Zero, Marvel Zombies) offers a checklist to determine whether you’d survive or not in the event of the unthinkable—which, if you’re reading this, you probably think about far more than you should. The checklist originally appeared in his non-fiction handbook Zombie: CSU, an essential tome for the discerning zombie head.

Jack Kilborn, also known to the world as indie revolutionary J.A. Konrath, offers a bonus peek at his novel Endurance—while it’s not a zombie novel, it provides more-than-sufficient terror factor and bodily fluids.

I’ve also included the script for the Murdermouth comic, illustrated by Derlis Santacruz, who provided the cover art. We have a special offer for you:

Donate $25 to help produce the full-color comic and you will be drawn in the comic as a zombie! Yes, you can be a brain-munching, vacant-eyed moron until the end of time and get a file of the panel to print out or stick on your favorite Web hangout. How cool is that? Details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/murdermouth.com.

In the end, I offer this previously unpublished tale, “A Farewell to Arms,” written especially for this collection.

So mark me down as a fan of the “slow” zombies. It’s not where you start, it’s how you finish.

--Scott Nicholson

Autumn, 2010

A Farewell to Arms

By Scott Nicholson

The barn had everything you’d want in a place to die.

Some soft, golden hay, a few chickens down below if you liked your eggs raw, an old hand-operated water pump that sucked cold water from an artesian well deep beneath the soil. It was quiet, except for the chickens, and surrounded on all sides by unkempt but level pastures. Not a living soul in sight.

No unliving souls, either.

The little farmhouse at the end of the dirt road had burned days before. Casey had kicked around in the charred chunks, looking for anything useful like canned vegetables or metal tools, but all he’d found were some coins and a handful of bone fragments. The fragments bore teeth marks.

Leaning against a hay bale in the loft of the barn, he tossed one of the blackened coins in the air.

“Heads or tails,” he said.

“Heads,” Maleah said.

Casey let the coin hit the hard boards of the floor. It rolled until it found a crack, then fell through into the dried manure below.

“Guess it won’t be so easy,” Casey said.

“Did you think it would be?”

Seven days on the road, and they’d developed an uneasy conversational style. Casey, the hardened optimist and Maleah, the determined cynic. They might have made a good comedy team. The Belushi and Akroyd of the apocalypse. The audience would be dying with laughter.

Beyond the pastures, the gentle hills rolled in September splendor. The ocher, purple, and scarlet of the changing leaves were like a rumpled patchwork quilt. If not for the thin threads of smoke on the horizon, then it might have passed for an idyllic autumn day in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“You never told me where you were headed,” Casey said.

“Is anybody headed anywhere?”

Casey was annoyed by her habit of making a question out of everything. He had as many questions as the next guy. Like, “What the hell happened?” and “Why is God such a heartless bastard?” But did you hear him going on and on about it? No. He played the cards you dealt him. “I mean, before all this. You had a family, right?”

Maleah twisted her wedding ring. She hadn’t mentioned her husband. It was another of those questions that Casey had kept to himself. God was heartless, but adultery was a sin, and the less said about that, the better.

“I was going to Charlotte,” Maleah said. “I thought I’d fly to the Bahamas. But they’d already closed the airport.”

“They’re probably in the Bahamas by now anyway.”

“Probably everywhere.”

“Arctic, maybe. Do people live up above Canada? Maybe if it’s too cold, they can’t move.”

“They’re dead. I doubt they feel the cold.”

Casey stood and walked to the shelf where hand tools, farm supplies, and buckets of screws and nails huddled in dusty piles. The wall was covered with dried-out strips of harness, yellow rope, baling wire, and chains. A couple of shovels, a hoe, and a blunt, rusty axe hung from ten-penny nails. A dented trash can in the corner was half full of dried feed corn. Casey scooped a palm full of kernels and tossed them through a hay chute. Below, chickens squawked and tussled over the grain.

Maybe they would cook a chicken first. Casey had killed chickens as a kid while visiting his grandfather’s farm. Well, he hadn’t actually been the one to bring down the blade, but he was there when the chickens ran around, frantic and flapping, their heads lying with beaks opening and closing, probably asking questions of the god of the chickens.

He could do it. Bring the blade down quick—that’s what Grampy Willers said. You owed it to them to do it clean. “Painless that way,” Grampy insisted, as if he knew the feelings of chickens.

Casey tore a strip of tar paper from the roll beside the shelf. He carried it to the window, which was just a square opening covered with chicken wire. He spread out the strip of tar paper and fished a small can of pork and beans from his pocket. He placed the can on the black paper so the sun would heat it up.

“Pork and beans again?” Maleah said.

Beans made him fart. Maleah said something the first time, as if manners still mattered. And for a while, Casey would walk a little bit away, release his gas, and sidle back over, barely missing a step. Then he decided this was no time to be uptight about farting, so he let them rip whenever he felt like it.

“I thought about cooking up a chicken,” Casey said. “We’d have to make a fire, and they might smell the meat.”

“They smell the meat anyway.”

Maleah, sitting on a bale of hay, pulled an apple from her satchel. She rubbed it against the thigh of her jeans and took a crisp, wet bite. Chomping with her mouth open, she said, “Wonder what—happened—to the—people—in—”

“You know what happened.” Casey was mad now. “It doesn’t matter what people, where, or when. You know what happened.”

She finished chewing before she spoke again. “Have you seen anybody get bit? Up close, I mean?”

Casey didn’t want to remember, but it was one of those things. The soldiers had already broken ranks, at last recognizing a new chain of command. But they still clustered with their guns, suspicious and scared and clinging to the dregs of honor and duty. They were shooting anything that moved, holed up in a restaurant in downtown Asheville, and Casey had nearly taken a bullet when he broke in through the service bay to prowl the kitchen.

While he was explaining himself at gunpoint, a walkie talkie crackled, informing the soldiers that Sector 37 had been overrun. Casey didn’t know anything about sectors. He’d waited until the soldiers evacuated, then cleaned out the refrigerator. Those were the good old days, the immediate aftermath, when the power was out but most things were still close to normal.

If you didn’t count the zombies.

Casey had thought about waiting out whatever needed to be waited out, right there in the restaurant, but when he opened the walk-in cooler to look for bacon, one of the zombies had staggered out, mouth wet with gore. Casey had shoved the door closed and the zombie had hammered on it from the inside, too stupid to push the little handle and get out.

So, technically, he hadn’t seen that mutilated, screaming waitress get bitten, but he’d seen plenty enough to imagine it all.

“Saw some in Asheville,” he said. “In the early days.”

“Asheville is nice,” Maleah said. “I took the kids to the art museum there. In the old days.”

Casey noticed that time was measured in days lately: Old Days, Early Days, Final Days. If you liked years, well, you were pretty much in the wrong time. Simple as that.

“Were they with you in Charlotte?”

“No. They went with their dad. Figured a cruise ship was safer. Things were . . . you know how people get under stress.”

Yep. Casey knew. His mother was in Raleigh. Even if you had a car, you couldn’t get gas, and even if you had gas, all the roads were blocked with broken-down cars. A motorcycle might have done some good, but those had been snatched up by people with rifles. So Casey put his mother out of his mind. Simple as that.

“That where you got the bruise?” Casey said, taking the can of pork and beans to her. They weren’t warm yet, but at least he’d tried. He flipped the tab, peeled the lid, and gave her the can.

She touched the side of her face before taking the can. “No,” she said, so fast that the lie was out there hanging in the air like a bean fart. “I banged into a door.”

“Mob scenes,” Casey said, feeding the lie a little so she could relax. Anxiety was bad for the digestion and he never should have asked.

She stared into the greasy sheen riding the top of the can’s contents. “You’d like to think we would have done better.”

Casey nodded, and then realized she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring into the brown liquid as if reliving some callous atrocity, a kid knocked off his bike in the rush to escape them, a woman tossing her baby at one to buy a little more time to run. Or maybe someone leaving a waitress trapped in a walk-in cooler so the zombie would eat her instead of him.

Things like that. Things you didn’t want to remember.

She was already a goner. You couldn’t have saved her. That’s the story you stick with.

He told her that version, the one where he was almost a hero.

Maleah fished her knife around in the can and came up with a few beans. “I can’t eat meat anymore,” she said.

“Too bad,” he said. “I was thinking about those chickens.”

As if volunteering for the roasting spit, a rooster crowed, the sound cracked and piercing in the pastoral calm. Casey glanced out the window, measuring the sun against the horizon. Maybe half an hour until dark.

Not that they cared about dark. They marched and munched all the same, full-time hunger, plenty to do and forever to do it in.

But dark made a big difference if you counted on sight instead of smell. Zombies did their best work at night because the prey was more vulnerable. Nature’s rules were pretty simple. Survival of the fittest.

“We could keep going north,” Casey said.

“And make Canada in, what, two years?”

“You never know. There have to be pockets. Soldiers and the government and police. Somebody had to be ready for this.”

“How could you be ready for this?”

“Lakes.” Casey was getting annoyed, and he didn’t like the whispering in his head. With the waitress, it had been easy. She was a stranger. Just another wide-eyed, open-mouthed rack of ribs, half his size. Easy to shove into the walk-in cooler.

But this woman . . . well, they’d gotten to know each other.

“And what do we do if we find a lake?” She spoke around a mouthful of beans, and a piece of pork clung to her lips. In her hunger, she’d already given up her newfound vegetarianism.

“A boat, maybe. They probably can’t swim.”

“And we live on fish?”

He looked at the ax on the wall, and the chains. The farmer had probably killed his hogs in this barn, slit their throats and hung them up below, their corpses dangling from chains while he worked out the innards. Blood dripping onto the packed carpet of hay and manure, flies orbiting in a red frenzy.

“Hard losing your kids that way, huh?” he said.

“I haven’t lost them. They’re out there somewhere.”

Sure they were. Just like his mother and the waitress and his best friend Tyler who’d climbed a tree with a shotgun and a week’s worth of cheese and crackers and a twelve-pack, determined to wait them out. Everyone was out there somewhere. Everyone was doing just fine.

Casey pulled the cell phone out of his pocket. He flipped it open to check the signal. Whatever had knocked out the electricity must have messed with the phones, too. Terrorists, he’d heard. Well, there was a new kind of terror to worry about

The battery probably had another day or so. It meant nothing but comfort. A last link with the way things used to be. He resisted the urge to click through his numbers. It would only make him think about how those people might have been caught.

Maleah wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her pumpkin-colored blouse. She was a redhead and the colors didn’t go well together.

“Want some?” she asked, holding out the can.

“I’m not real hungry,” he said.

He’d found a rifle in Hickory, a furniture-factory town that had been dying long before the end of the world arrived. The rifle had some icky gel on the shoulder stock, and Casey had worried he’d catch an infection from it. But the rifle was a single-shot, low-caliber. He didn’t know much about guns but he’d fired at one of them. The zombie had been digging in a bundle of clothes on the far end of the street.

At least, he was pretty sure it was a zombie.

Some guy in a cowboy hat told him the next day you had to shoot them in the head or it was a waste of good ammo. The cowboy seemed to be having the time of his life, tooling around in an open-top Jeep with big tires. The Jeep bristled with barbed wire, and in the passenger seat were half a dozen guns. The cowboy offered him a ride, said they could go cross-country and not worry about the clogged roads, but he was headed toward the zombies, not away from them.

North. That was what everybody else said to do.

No reason, really. People just had to go somewhere, and having a direction was almost as good as having a reason to live.

“It’ll be dark soon,” he said.

She touched the top button of her blouse, as if she were undecided whether she would undress again. Or maybe just embarrassed. Things you did in the dark were easier to forget happened. Maybe it was even easier to die in the dark.

“How far is the next town?” she asked.

“Probably ten miles,” he said.

He’d just picked a number out of thin air. Ten miles didn’t sound too far, but not close enough for her to want to leave the barn. He didn’t suppose there were a lot of “nexts” left in the world. Only plenty of “lasts.”

She scraped up the last of the beans with the knife and slid them into her mouth, careful not to cut her tongue. She licked the blade and folded it closed.

“Chickens might have laid some eggs,” Casey said. He hadn’t looked around too much when they’d entered the barn. There were too many shadowy pens and corn bins, barrels and stacked wooden crates. A rusty tractor was parked at one end of the barn, but Casey hadn’t even bothered to start it. Even at full speed, it wouldn’t outrun them.

“Bacon would be nice,” Maleah said, forgetting she was almost a vegetarian.

“And sausage and pancakes and toast. A good cup of coffee. Brewed, not that powdered instant in cold water.”

She tossed the empty can through the square hole in the floor. The holes were used to throw down bales of hay to the animals. They’d bothered Casey at first, because he imagined ways they might crawl up through them in the night. The wooden door blocking the narrow stairs was heavy and solid, and there was no other easy way in except the holes. But the hayloft was 12 feet above the dirt, and Casey figured holes worked both ways, because they could get out fast if necessary.

“How many could you fight off if you had to?” she said. She didn’t give him back the knife. She wormed it into the front pocket of her jeans.

“I don’t know. Two, maybe. Three if I had room.”

“The one in Asheville, did it touch you?”

“Not my skin. It grabbed my shirt and tore it. But I got him away before he got close.”

“Do you feel bad that you couldn’t save her?”

He shrugged. “She was a goner anyway.”

Weak. Slow. Trying to help him when she should have been running away.

Stupid.

“Well, maybe in a way, you made up for it by finding me.”

They’d met in the snack section of a convenience store. The front glass had been broken out. She had an armful of potato chip bags and he’d suggested she grab some drinks because she’d soon be thirsty. The beer was warm so he went for Gatorade. The store had been plenty wrecked.

As they were leaving, he noticed the cash register was open and the bills gone. Some people never changed. Unless they got bit.

Then they changed plenty.

The two of them didn’t discuss traveling together. They’d just both started down the same street in the same direction at the same time. A few other people were around, a dark-skinned boy running, one tennis shoe lost, his bare foot slapping on the pavement. An old man wobbled by, leaning on his cane, eyeing them as if unsure whether they were human or zombie. A woman pushing a baby carriage crossed in front of them, staring way into the distance where fire sirens were screaming. A female cop trying to direct traffic, pointing her pistol in the air and getting ignored.

Casey kept walking, and Maleah kept walking, and now here they were.

“They smell bad,” Casey offered, as if to downplay the stench of chicken manure. “Like a septic tank and rotten eggs and roadkill skunk rolled into one.”

“A lot of infection. I studied that in nursing school. A human mouth has more germs than a dog mouth.”

Casey gazed out across the pasture to the west. The night would be bad. They could run for it, and maybe make it. For one more day.

“Just supposin’,” Casey said. “What if you had your kids, and you were trapped, and those things were breaking in. Could you stand to see it?”

Maleah flipped the knife back open as if imagining the scene. “Depends on if I had a gun or not.”

“Okay, then. Two kids, three bullets. Five zombies. You know how they come in packs.”

She stood, trembling, lips peeled back in anger, and at first he thought she was going to stab him. She gripped the knife in her slender fingers. “You want me to kill them, don’t you? That’s what you’re asking. Even if I killed three zombies—and I’ve never shot a gun in my life—then there would still be two to eat my children.”

Casey backed up a step in the face of her sudden frenzy. He’d just meant to get the idea planted, not piss her off. Women. You can never use logic on them. He didn’t know why he had to keep relearning that lesson.

She went limp, letting the knife fall to the hard wooden floor, where it clattered. Her outburst had upset a hen, which squawked downstairs from some dusty hutch. Casey wondered if zombies could hear things like that.

“Amber and Stevie,” she said, voice now far away, as if these past few weeks had never happened.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” he said. He’d already made her kill them in her mind, so he could afford a little mercy.

In this world, if you wanted to make it, you had to kill off everybody. The living and the dead.

The chicken had calmed down a little, the frantic clucks giving way to uneasy cooing. Grampy said that’s how you picked out which one to kill, the one that was nervous. “Natural selection,” he called it, a phrase Casey dimly remembered from high school science. If the class had been more about what to do when dead people were walking around trying to eat you, Casey probably would have paid more attention and actually learned something useful.

What you did, Grampy said, was grab it around the neck. Some people liked to yank, popping the spine, but Grampy said the meat was better if you let the ax do the work, because then you were bleeding it at the same time. Two birds with one stone, he said. The headless chicken would run around for a minute or two, not knowing it was dead, spraying all that crazy out of its system.

Then you split it open and peeled its skin off like a glove—

“I killed them,” she said.

He forgot where he was, so deeply was he back on that Iowa farm, with its endless summer days, sweet corn on the cob, the swimming hole down at the creek, and Susan Vaughn in her pink wet shorts.

He blinked and stared at her. The dusk had settled, crept through the windows so fast he hadn’t noticed. Maleah’s face was radiant, caught in the last rays of that sagging egg-yolk sun.

“I saw where it was headed,” she said. “More of them and less of us, every single day. I couldn’t let them become them.”

She didn’t have to explain. That’s why Casey had run in the first place—not so much to survive, but because he couldn’t stand the notion of familiar forms shambling toward him with that bottomless hunger in their dead eyes. Grampy without his dentures, gums flapping. Susan Vaughn with blood on her shorts. His mother with her bad knees, wriggling forward like a snake. Tyler and his Busch-Lite-hangover shuffle.

Something had changed outside, and the angle of the light made the trees soft and golden, and shadows grew over the land. Autumn had this way about it, sad and sweet at the same time, like a kiss that had to end.

There was movement in the trees, but the wind was dead.

So were the things that walked from the forest.

“Here they come,” he said, and the words were easy, like he’d rehearsed them in his head a million times.

He’d wanted to ask how she’d done it. Knife, gun, drowning in the bathtub. He’d seen her stretch marks and knew how crazy women got over the things they’d carried in their bellies.

Maybe she hadn’t been afraid of them turning at all. She might have been more afraid at turning herself and then putting those babies back in her belly.

He was going to ask if they should run for it. Say something like, “Next town is only ten miles.” But running in the dark was no good, and the moon had been shrinking each night. Plus she was tired.

Survival of the fittest, and she wasn’t so fit anymore.

In the last of the light, he went to the wall of the barn. Rope, chains, a spiky tool that looked like it was used to roll logs. The ax was the way to go. Take off the head with one chop. Just like with Grampy’s chickens.

“I should have done it myself,” she said. “But I was too chicken.”

“I know,” he said, thinking of the bullets in the rifle he’d wasted. The ax felt good in his hands.

Outside, the forms were moving across the yellow stubble of the pasture, down rows of dying corn, through the brown briars. Walking toward the barn, the only meat for miles.

Casey wondered if they would eat the chickens, too.

“Think you can?” she asked.

Like a kiss that had to end.

He went to her as dark fell.

DEAD INK

By Scott Nicholson

Richter leaned back in his chair and snuck a peek past his cubicle opening and through the editor’s window.

No doubt Harbinson was about to send out one of his passive-aggressive emails, resorting to cyberspace for what he could have accomplished with a simple yell out his office door. Richter knew the drill, though. His copy had been sloppy, and no wonder; he was one burned-out cinder of a beat reporter, a crispy critter, cooked in his liver and frontal lobe. Barbecue. Dead meat.

Sure, he could justify the crappy output. Fifteen years on the news desk, a grand total of 347 county commissioner meetings, the usual land-use disputes, and plenty of ribbon-cuttings featuring the same old speeches by the mayor and the same old posing and strutting by the hogs at the Chamber of Commerce trough. And now a press release from the Sons of Lazarus. The Chief had him scraping the bottom of the barrel, apparently: the religion beat.

Ping.

The email icon blinked on his desktop and he punched it up with a grimace. He muttered under his breath in anticipation of the scolding. “Lack of professionalism, lack of spell check, lack of journalistic curiosity…”

Instead, it was a 10-32. The subject line read “Dead on the scene.”

Harbinson had the police scanner in his office, and though most newsrooms treated the scanner like a holy artifact meriting its own high pedestal, the editor of the Meadowmont Post loved control far more than he loved instant coverage. In the news game, sometimes seconds were the difference between a scoop and the same old tired follow-ups. Richter opened the email, and in this case Harbinson couldn’t fault his curiosity, because Harbinson usually sent the juicy crime stuff to Marla Eggermeyer, who was young and cute and most likely the object of Harbinson’s frustrated sexual fantasies. To put lemon juice on the cut, Marla was also the best writer on staff.

But here was Harbinson trusting Richter with a 10-32. The message read, “Police responding to a report of a body at 188 Snowball Avenue. No foul play suspected.”

That explained it. Most likely it was a suicide, and like most small-town papers, the Post kept such non-news out of the paper. The same was true of most natural deaths, unless the deceased happened to be a prominent citizen or Chamber of Commerce swine. Harbinson had assigned him a story that probably wouldn’t result in a story. Richter would spend two hours circling his own asshole trying to get a statement from the police captain, who would fall back on “No comment until the ME’s report.” In a field that followed the edict “If it bleeds, it leads,” cold cases rarely made it beyond the obituary page.

Richter gathered his laptop, note pad, and digital camera, stopping by the editor’s office on his way out. “Won’t get much mileage reimbursement out of this one,” he said. “Snowball Avenue is just a block over.”

“Then you should have a brief filed in less than an hour,” Harbinson said, not looking away from his computer monitor.

“If anything happens,” Richter said.

“It’s your job to make something happen.”

“Right, Chief.” Richter gave a little one-fingered salute to accent the sarcasm, but Harbinson was busy toying with his palm pilot.

As Richter was leaving, the scanner crackled and spat copspeak. “Another 10-32 at 212 Snowball.”

A twofer? Maybe it was a joint suicide, or a murder-suicide. Either way, it suggested ink. With any luck, it would be some cult thing and not a domestic dispute. Richter was about to hustle off before Harbinson could shift the assignment to Marla, but the scanner stopped him again.

“Unit 20 from the 10-32.” Sounded like a cop, from the twang. “There ain’t no body here.”

The dispatcher cut in with unprofessional honesty. “Well, it didn’t just get up and walk away.”

“Might have been a hoax.”

“The number checked. Wait, here’s another one. 215 Snowball. Request back-up?”

“No, if it’s dead, I can handle it.” Sarcasm wasn’t limited to burned-out journalists.

“Get on it,” Harbinson said, turning up the scanner’s volume. “This is sounding weird. Want me to send Marla along?”

As much as Richter would enjoy riding shotgun in Marla’s car, with the heady scent of her perfume suppressing his whiskey stench, he wanted this story. He smelled a press award if it stayed as strange as it suggested.

He was in the parking lot peeling rubber in his rusty Celica when Marla ran out the door, waving a stack of papers. Richter was tempted to pretend he didn’t see her, but she wasn’t the kind you could avoid looking at. Her taut little breasts bobbed up and down as she approached him, skirt flaring, jiggling on her high heels like a new-born filly.

Richter rolled down his window, a tactic designed to force her to lean in and talk to him, maybe offering him a quick peek down her blouse.

“Richter, this fax just came in,” she said, thrusting the loose pages into his lap.

He lifted the closest one, recognizing the logo of an outfit called PressCom, Inc., obviously a PR firm, judging by the woodenness of the writing. He recited the headline: “The Sons Of Lazarus Sayeth the Dead Shall Rise.”

“CNN just reported an attack on a morgue in Raleigh.”

“Who would attack a morgue?”

“Exactly. They think it was a stunt of this Lazarus bunch.”

“Man, maybe I should go work for those guys. Looks like they understand the importance of timing.”

“Richter—”

“Call me Stan,” he said. He’d been trying for months to get her to drop the journalistic custom of reporters going by their last names on the job, but she either ignored it or missed all his overtures. Besides, she was probably getting boned by the publisher, a 55-year-old vulture who drove a BMW to work while many of his employees took second jobs to make ends meet.

“That second body is missing, too,” she said, sweeping back her auburn hair. “If the Lazarus cult is active in Meadowmont, this could be a big story. Maybe even national.”

“Which means we better get it before CNN shows up.” Richter didn’t think it possible that a nut-wing group would pick a backwater like Meadowmont for a publicity stunt, but there was no accounting for family connections. He shuffled through the loose papers until he found contact information.

“I want this one,” Marla said.

“Wait a fucking second. You’re listed as the media contact on this press release.”

She shrugged, creating a fetching ripple across her bosom. “I moonlight. What can I say?”

“Is this bogus?”

“Call me and find out.”

She walked in front of his car and he pumped his accelerator, hoping the sudden roar of the engine would cause her to jump. Instead, his foot slipped from the brake and the car lurched forward, the bumper smacking into her with a meaty thunk. As Richter stabbed at the brake, he hit the gas again and the wheels thumped over her body, the crankcase grinding bone.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Richter said, finally drawing to a stop. He peered out his window and saw one pert ankle twisted at an odd angle, the strapless fuck-me heel several feet away.

“Marla?” he said, opening the door, debating for a moment whether he should just punch it and put Meadowmont in the rearview mirror, become a fugitive from justice, the lead story in tomorrow’s edition.

He knelt on the grimy asphalt, dreading what he might see. She didn’t look as bad as he feared she would, but even dead she was a hot little number.

Hot but cooling fast.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

An accident. They’ll believe it. Hell, I might even get workman’s comp if I fake a nervous breakdown.

He didn’t think it would be that hard to fake. He touched her leg, just above a nasty scrape that was already oozing a mixture of fat and blood. He let his fingers slide just a little higher along her thigh. Red panties. She was still, no pulse, no sound of raspy breath, and certainly no capacity to tell on him or accuse him of sexual assault.

Enough. This was getting creepy, even for him. He ran into the building, already planning the statement he would give police, making sure he had time to rehearse for the perfect touch of regret and shock.

“What is it?” Harbinson said as Richter raced for his cubicle.

“The phone, quick,” Richter said. The rest of the newsroom, full of people who were used to ignoring distractions, fell silent, as if his vibration had rattled their invisible antennae.

“Calm down, Richter,” Harbinson said.

“It’s Marla.”

“I sent her out on the DOA’s.”

“No, you don’t get it…she’s the DOA.”

A scream from one of the graphic artists near the door caused Harbinson to turn away. Marla staggered into the newsroom, grinning with broken teeth, one arm dangling with a gleam of protruding bone. She hobbled forward on one bare foot.

“Sons of Lazarus,” Richter said.

Harbinson, as clueless as ever, hurried toward her, too indoctrinated as a gentleman and leader to see that she was dead and still moving.

The attack on the morgue hadn’t been staged by the cult. No, it had been an inside job.

Just as this one is shaping up to be.

Harbinson reached out for his undead reporter, and Richter had just enough time to grab his camera before she hugged the editor and yanked him close.

Even dead, she really knocks ‘em dead, Richter thought, but then Harbinson’s squeal of terror ripped the room.

The scanner in Harbinson’s office was going nuts, 10-32s mixing with reports of suspicious persons and possible 10-10s and random assaults.

Richter ducked into Marla’s cubicle and grabbed her laptop. “You won’t be needing this, sweets,” he said.

By the time he emerged, Harbinson was on his knees, squealing, and Richter chuckled at the notion that the editor likely never figured going down on Marla would be anything like this. A red geyser spurted from the maw of his torn neck and Marla was already sniffing the air, blank eyes staring dead ahead for fresh meat.

Richter ran for the press warehouse. Because of the dangerous machinery, access was restricted and the metal doors easily bolted from inside. Richter could probably talk the press operator into changing the lead story.

He was toying with the headline of “Inside Job,” but this was big. Plus, the second rule of journalism, after the gratuitous use of blood, was to always lead with a hot chick or a puppy. Since no puppies had yet been harmed in the making of Richter’s first press association award, he would stick with the chick.

He entered the press warehouse as another scream, the next of many, echoed through the newsroom.

After securing the door, Richter powered up the laptop and sat down to his task. “Zombie Cult Shocker,” he typed.

Hell, if the press operator didn’t like it, Richter could always adapt it into a cheesy horror script. After all, typing was typing and words were words, when you got right down to it. Any mindless creature could do it.

He brought his finger to his nose, sniffing her scent, wondering if the brief exposure to Marla’s infected flesh was enough to convert him into a member of her cult.

Fuck it.

A zombie dead or a zombie living, what was the difference?

He had a deadline to meet.

So he typed.

NEED

By Scott Nicholson

The first moon was big and white in the sky. But now it is small and not round. So many things not the same anymore. Can't remember all of before. All of before was other me.

Truck, remember truck, me in front seat, the other person there. Hair long, yellow, I like my hand in it, soft. The moon on her face. Blue eyes, the dark part wide and shiny, like the water caves. Wind coming fast across my lips. Her mouth touches. The arms I had around her. She is close, warm like the sun that burns my eyes between times of moon. Her neck, smell of trees with flowers. I call her Page with my mouth. Quiet and full of breath.

Can't call now. I think things like Page and Hello and Help Me but mouth doesn't know how to make the words loud. Mouth doesn't move when I want to call. Mouth only knows one thing. Mouth that was touching her mouth then. Sound in my chest, over and over, fast when I touch her. A sound from before, but maybe the first moon made it, because I don't hear it now.

That was other me. Other me whose mouth touch Page wet and hear her call I Love You and moon shines in truck and I need and dark falls over moon.

Outside is thing like me now and head has red wet holes and eyes are open but don't see and hands of dirt come into the truck. I hear scream but thing's mouth does not move. Scream comes from Page's mouth. Hands of dirt reach, touch her neck the same way I touch, and her mouth makes hurt sounds. I grab hands of dirt and my mouth calls Run Page Run and I don't see her because the thing pulls me close, thing strong and smell like deep inside water caves, skin green like grass and white like moon, then mouth is open and black tongue slide over teeth gray as rocks and touch my face but thing's tongue not wet like Page's.

Teeth follow tongue into my face below my eye and I hear sound like walking in mud and hot wet on my face and I almost remember now what hurt felt like but I can't. My mouth makes sounds and I push and touch teeth that close and my fingers snap like sticks and hang from thing's mouth. I scream red and under the moon, fingers look like worms.

Hands of dirt hold me and I call Page, Page, but she is gone and I remember place she sleeps is behind the trees. My breath is rags like the thing's shirt and when mouth comes again I close my eyes and hurt and then I am walking away from the other me and into the long dark cave.

I remember some things clear like water but other things are still inside cave where moon never shines. The me that I am now touches trees, touches face, no breath from my mouth, I touch rags and the rags are my skin. No moon in sky, but sun, and birds make sounds and I smell birds and I need.

Dirt and blood and smell of truck and sweet Page like flowers and the grass where the sun has made it hot. I go away from truck and legs move and no more long dark cave. Smell of wet leaves and I go through trees and tree arms hold like Page holds other me under the moon. Tree arms sharp make rags in skin but no hurt so legs go away and take me.

Smell water and touch water and small wet thing moves so I pick it up and it is cold but it breathes and my mouth needs and my hand moves thing to my face. Warm and sticky and I feed and my mouth needs again. My legs go away and I am in trees and moon is in dark sky. Legs go where I need.

Trees make black lines. Eyes see light like moon but moon small on the ground. Legs go to light and out of trees to place where Page sleeps. Sound from mouth of dog and I smell dog and dog is warm and breathes and I need inside and I feed and still my mouth needs. I walk to light and hand pushes wood and glass and wood tears skin and I hear wet sound and I smell Page like flowers.

Page, my mouth calls but no sound as legs go to Page and her mouth makes sound like in truck and her hair yellow and I remember other me with arms holding and mouth touching but other me is in long dark cave and now I see her and smell her and her eyes are the color of sky in sun and my legs go and hers do not and I try to call Page, I Love You and my mouth touches her lips that are soft and my hand of dirt in long hair like before and my teeth follow tongue and her mouth is wet and she is warm and breathes and I want to hear the sound in my chest over and over again fast like before.

But nothing is like before and no sound in my chest. Her mouth calls words but my words make no wind because I think Page and Hello and Help Me but mouth only knows one thing now. Her mouth makes more sounds but not I Love You. Some things are clear like water and my mouth needs and I take her into the long dark cave where moon never shines.

And I need.

CARNIVAL KNOWLEDGE

By Scott Nicholson

The sky is hot with popcorn and apple caramel and the diesel exhaust of the big engines. Bright wheels spin, on fire with green and yellow jewels. Screams are tossed from the wheels, brittle on the air like thin shafts of ice. Broad organ notes lurch along to the beat of three. The pounding of the music against your skin reminds you of the thing inside your chest that used to have music of its own.

They cluster beyond the cage, those cruel breathers, those who walk. Mouths open wide, eyes open wide, they give money to the fat man in the long coat. A young one comes close, his mother tugs the back of his jacket, says words that have no meaning. You beg with your eyes for him to put his hand through the bars.

The wheels tilt and whirl, the organ trips faster, a man is laughing. You smell the hard bite of liquor on his breath, though he’s at the rear of the crowd. If you could hate, you would wish him in the cage with you. But you can only love.

You look past the crowd, for they will not return your love. Tents with striped roofs lean in different directions, sparks of light and tinkling coins and shouts spilling from the doorways. If you could walk, you would go among them, see for yourself what strange pleasures hide in each. But then you think that the tents may hold only more like you.

The fat man has fat pockets, bulging with money. He turns to you and smiles. You should hate this man, for he is the one who caged you. He rattles the bars with a long stick.

“Give ‘em a show, freak.”

You know the words but do not know what they mean. You only know that if you show your love, the man will love you in return. They will all love you, though they eat air and spit air and you are as far from them as the tiny holes in the darkness above.

The crowd shouts and leans forward, their skin is electric. The wayward boy comes too close, you reach out to touch and love him. His mother screams and yanks him away. You look at the empty night that surrounds your fingers.

When you die, you should not know these things. You should not see and smell and hear better than when your heart made music. You should not taste.

The fat man beats the bars again and you cannot love any of these people, not the way you should, not with your mouth. You can only love yourself.

You raise your leg, the last remaining one. Flesh hangs in rags around a gleaming knot of bone. The meat is between your teeth and the crowd gasps and sighs and the fat man is smiling.

But they will never love you as you need to be loved.

You feed, you hunger.

You should not know these things.

A Matter of Taste

By Jack Kilborn

“Finish your brains, Phillip.”

Phillip pushed the jellied hunk away, using his stump.

“I don’t want any more.”

Mom squinted in his general direction; her eyes had long since dried up and fallen out.

“Don’t you like brains? All little zombie boys need to eat brains. You want to become rotten and putrefied like Dad, right?”

“Arrgghhhhh,” said Dad. He didn’t have a bottom jaw, so pronunciation wasn’t one of his strengths.

“You know I do, Mom. It’s just...”

“Just what?”

Phillip folded his arms and picked his nose with the ulna protruding from his stump.

“Phillip!” Mom chided. “Manners!”

“Arrghhhh,” his father concurred.

Phillip stopped picking.

“I hate brains.”

Mom took a deep breath, and blew it out of the bullet holes in her lungs.

“Fine. Finish your small intestines and you can be excused.”

Phillip made a face.

“I don’t want to.”

“But Phillip, you love intestines. Don’t you remember when you rose from the grave? You’d stuff yourself with guts until they were slithering out of your little undead bottom.”

Phillip stuck out his lower lip.

“I don’t want to eat this stuff anymore, Mom.”

“Arrghhhh,” said Dad.

“See, Phillip? You’re upsetting your father. Do you know how hard he works, hunting the living all day and night, to bring back fresh meat so you can eat? It isn’t easy work—he can’t move much faster than a limp, and most of the humans left are heavily armed and know to aim for the head.”

Phillip stood up. “I don’t like it! I don’t like the taste! I don’t like the smell! And most of all, I don’t like eating people I used to go to school with! Last week we ate my best friend, Todd!”

“We’re the living dead! It’s what we do!”

Phillip’s father shrugged, reaching for the child’s plate. He dumped the contents onto the edge of the table, and then lowered his face to the organs and bumped at them with his teeth—the only way he could chew.

“I don’t want to be a zombie anymore, Mom!”

“We don’t have a choice, Phillip.”

“Well, from now on, I’m eating something else.” Phillip reached under the table and held up a plastic bag.

“What is that?” Mom demanded. “I hear roughage.”

“It’s a Waldorf Salad.”

“Phillip!”

“I’m sorry, Mom. But this is what I’m going to eat from now on. It has apples, and walnuts, and a honey-lemon mayonnaise.”

“I forbid it!”

“Arrghhhhh,” Dad agreed.

“I don’t care!” Phillip cried. “I’m a vegan, Mom! A vegan! And there’s nothing you can do about it!”

He threw the salad onto the table and shuffled off, crying.

Dad shoved a piece of duodenum down his throat, then patted his wife on the bottom.

“Arrghhhh.”

“I know, dear. But what can we do? Blow off his head and eat him for lunch tomorrow?”

“Arrghhhh?”

“Good idea. I’ll fetch the shotgun.”

Mom limped in the general direction of the gun closet.

“Waldorf Salad? Not in my house.”

EAT ME

By Scott Nicholson

Eat me.

Kind of like in the old days, when you were dead and I was still alive.

Maybe it can never be the same, but when you’re dead, you have plenty of time to dream. So I’m dreaming, okay? What’s wrong with that? What’s the worst that can happen?

Oh.

God can show up.

Yeah, like that’ll happen. You think that bastard will show up now, since His happy little playground is nothing but a Ground Zero wasteland. That would be classic. I’d love to see the Big Guy serving himself up as loaves and fishes for the vacant-eyed, fuck-brained dead. Giving Himself to me and you. A joke of a communion that would be the last thing we ever had in common.

It ain’t happening, okay? Look, you love me and I love you, but let’s get one thing straight.

It’s over.

That first bite was sweet, and nothing has ever made me happier than seeing a string of my small intestine slapping against your cheek, then disappearing between those ever-luscious lips. For the first time in our relationship, I was actually giving instead of thinking only of my own needs. And my needs were plenty. Back then, I mean. Lately, they have gotten pretty simple.

Munch out, honey.

Eat me. It’s the least I can offer, after all you’ve had to put up with and all we’ve been through.

You ate my pain and you consumed my pathetic excuses, you swallowed my half-assed lies, you got down on your knees and begged me to forgive you when it was me who had done wrong. I twisted it all around, and every time I slipped, I blamed you for the banana peel. But that was then and this is now, as some lame pop song once said, back in that plastic, noise-overdosed reality that we gobbled like fast-food fries.

Now, you’ve got the upper hand.

Or the three fingers that are left, anyway.

I know, I know, I’ve queered the deal, I used to let you go down on me without a second thought. But things are different now, you’ve got to admit. I kept my soft places hidden, the memories and the scars and the sorrows, and I only gave you my face. Now you want it all. And I can only give so much.

Look, I said forever, everything, love, all those empty, pretty words. But I was skin deep. I kept my true meat to myself. But you’re hungry and aching.

Why should things be any different just because you’re dead and your teeth are sharp and wet and I’m on my back with my hands in the air?

You wanted me heart and soul. Go ahead, take my heart. It no longer beats and it never knew how to work anyway.

Sorry, I’ve got nothing beyond deep. No soul. But you already knew that, and it never stopped you before.

All I can offer now is all I have.

All you ever wanted.

So eat me.

THE MEEK

By Scott Nicholson

The ram hit Lucas low, twisting its head so that its curled horns knocked him off his feet. The varmint was good at this. It had killed before. But the dead eyes showed no joy of the hunt, only the black gleam of a hunger that ran wider than the Gibson.

Lucas winced as he sprawled on the ground, tasting desert dust and blood, his hunger forgotten. As the Merino tossed its head, the horns caught the strange sunlight and flashed like knives. Lucas had only a moment to react. He rolled to his left, reaching for his revolver.

The ram lunged forward, its lips parted and slobbering. The mouth closed around the ankle of Lucas' left boot. He kicked and the spur raked across the ram's nose. Gray pus leaked from the torn nostrils, but the steer didn't even slow down in its feeding frenzy.

The massive head dipped again, going higher, looking for Lucas' flank. But Lucas wasn't ready to kark, not out here in the open with nothing but stone and scrub acacia to keep him company. Lucas filled his hand, ready to blow the animal back to hell or wherever else it was these four-legged devils came from.

But he was slow, tired from four days in the saddle and weak from hunger. The tip of one horn knocked the gun from his hand, and he watched it spin silver in the sky before dropping to the sand ten feet away. Eagles circled overhead, waiting to clean what little bit of meat the steer would leave on his bones. He fell back, hoping his leather chaps would stop the teeth from gnawing into his leg.

Just when he was ready to shut his eyes against the coming horror, sharp thunder ripped the sky open. At first he thought it was Gabriel's trumpet, harking and heralding and all that. Then Lucas was covered in the explosion of brain, bits of skull, and goo as the ram's head disappeared. The animal's back legs folded, and then it collapsed slowly upon itself. It fell on its side and twitched once, then lay still, thick fluid dribbling from the stump of its neck.

Gunsmoke filled the air, and the next breath was the sweetest Lucas had ever taken. He sat up and brushed the corrupted mutton from his face, then checked to make sure the animal's teeth hadn't broken his skin. The chaps were intact, with a few new scrapes in the leather.

" 'Bout got you," came a raspy voice. Lucas cupped his hand over his eyes and squinted as a shadow fell over him. The man was bow-legged, his rifle angled with the stock against his hip, the white avalanche beard descending from a Grampian mountain range of a face.

"Thank you, mate," Lucas said, wiping his mouth. "And thank the Lord for His mercy."

The old man kicked at the carcass, and it didn't move. He spat a generous rope of tobacco juice onto the oozing neck wound. Flies had already gathered on the corpse. Lucas hoped that flies didn't turn into flesh-eating critters, too. Having dead-and-back-again sheep coming after you was plenty bad enough.

"A stray. Third one today," the old man said, working the Remington's action so that the spent shell kicked free. He stooped to read the brand on the ram's hip. "Come from Kulgera. They never could keep 'em rounded up down those parts."

Lucas struggled to his feet, sore from the sheep-wrestling. He found his hat and secured it on his head, then returned his revolver to its holster. "If you hadn't come along when you did--"

The man cut in, his eyes bright with held laughter. "Hell, son, I been watching you for five minutes. Wasn't sure which of you was going to walk away. I'd have put two-to-one on the Merino, but nobody much left around to take the bet."

Lucas thought about punching the stranger in the face, but Lucas was afraid his hand would shatter against that stone-slick surface. The man must have seen the anger in Lucas' eyes, because the laugh busted free of the thin lips, rolling across the plateau like the scream of a dying wombat.

"Never you mind," the man said, slapping the barrel of his Remington. "I'd sooner sleep with a brown snake than watch a man get ate up."

He held his hand out. It was wrapped in a glove the color of a chalky mesa, stained a rusty red. Lucas took it and shook quickly, feeling a strength in the grip that didn't match the man's stringy muscles.

"Name's Camp," he said.

"Lucas," Lucas said. "Is 'Camp' short for something?"

"Not that I know of. Just Camp, is all."

"You're not Aussie."

"Hell, no. Come from Texas, U.S. of A. Had to leave 'cause the damned place was perk near run over by Mexicans and Injuns. You know how it is, when the furriners come in and take over, don't you?"

Lucas nodded, and said, "Things are crook in Musclebrook, no doubt." He walked toward his horse twenty yards away, to where it had fallen in a shallow gulley. Camp followed, solemn now. Nobody laughed at the loss of a good horse.

The horse whinnied softly, froth bubbling from its nose. A hank of flesh had been ripped from its side. The saddle strap had broken, tossing Lucas' canteen and lasso into a patch of saltbrush. The horse's tail whisked at the air, swatting invisible flies.

"Never thought I'd see the day a sheep could outrun a horse," Camp said.

"Never thought I'd see a lot of things," Lucas answered.

Camp spat again, and a strand of the brown juice clung to his beard. He was the first person Lucas had ever met who chewed tobacco. "Want to borrow my Remington?" he asked, holding out the rifle.

"Mate's got to do it his own way."

"Reckon so," Camp said, then turned so as not to see the tears in Lucas' eyes.

Lucas drew the revolver and put two bullets in the horse's head. Vickie, he'd called her. Had her for six years, had roped and broken her himself. Now she was nothing but eagle food. But at least she wouldn't rise up tonight, bucking and kicking and hungry for a long mouthful of the hand that had once fed her.

"Where you headed?" Camp asked when they'd reached the top of the gulley.

Lucas scanned the expanse of plateau ahead of them. Finally he shrugged. "I was mostly headed away from something, not toward something."

"Sheep's everywhere now, is the word. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, all your big transport cities. They roam the streets scrounging for ever scrap of human cud they can find."

"Even back Queensland?"

"Queensland got it bad. 'Course, them damned banana benders deserve everything they get, and then some." Camp took a plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket that looked like a dry dingo turd. He bit into it with his four best teeth, then worked it until he could spit again. He held out the plug to Lucas.

"No. You're a gent, though." Lucas was thirsty. He took a swig from his canteen, thought about offering a drink to Camp, then shuddered at the thought of the man's backwash polluting the water.

"I'm headed for Wadanetta Pass. Hear word there's a bunch holed up there."

"I didn't know some were trying to fight," Lucas said. "I figured it was every mate for himself."

He hadn't seen another person for three days, at least not one that was alive. He'd passed a lump of slimy dress this morning, a bonnet on the ground beside it. Might have been one of them pub girls, or some schoolmarm fallen from a wagon. The sight had about made him launch a liquid laugh.

"You hungry?" Camp asked.

"Nobody not? What the blooming hell is there to eat out here except weeds and poisoned meat? It was a fair go I'd have ended up eating my horse, and I liked my horse."

"Wadanetta is thataway," Camp said, pointing into the shimmering layers of heat that hung in the west. "Might reach it before night."

"Damn well better. I don't want to be out here in the dark with that bunch playing sillybuggers."

"Amen to that." Camp led the way, moving as if he had a gun trained on his back. It was all Lucas could do to keep up.

They walked in silence for about half an hour. Lucas' feet were burning in his boots. He was about convinced that hell lay only a few feet beneath the plains and that the devil was working up to the biggest jimbuck roundup of all time. First killer sheep, then a sun that glowed like a bloody eye.

"Suppose it's like this all about?" Lucas asked.

"You mean, out Kimberly and all that?"

"New Zealand. Guinea."

"Don't see why not. Sheep are sheep all over the world."

"Even over in England?"

"Bloody hope so."

"Beaut," said Lucas. "That bugger, God, ought to be half sporting, you'd think."

"Hell, them Merino probably would stoop to eating Aborigines. I heared of a country run all by darkies, hardly a white man there. These darkies, they worship cows. I mean, treat them like Jesus Christ come again."

Lucas almost smiled at that one. "Cows likely went over with the sheep. Bet the darkies changed their tune a little by now."

"Them what's left," Camp said, punctuating the sentence with tobacco spit.

They walked on as the sun sank lower and the landscape became a little rougher. A few hills rolled in the distance, dotted with scrub. They came to a creek, and Lucas pointed out the hoofprints in the muddy banks.

They stopped for a drink and to rest a few minutes, then continued. The sun was an hour from dark when they reached the base of a steep mesa. The cliffs were eroded from centuries of wind and weather. A small group of wooden humpies huddled in the shadow of the mesa.

"Wadanetta, dead ahead," Camp said. They broke into a jog. When they were a hundred yards away from the town, they shouted. Their voices echoed off the stone slopes. Nobody came from the gray buildings to greet them.

"Anybody here?" Lucas yelled as they reached a two-story building that looked like a knock shop. Camp pushed open the door. The parlor was empty, a table knocked over, playing cards spread across the floor. A piano sat in one corner, with a cracked mug on top.

They went inside, and Lucas yelled again. The only answer was the creaking of wood as a sunset wind arose. "Thought you said blokes was here," Lucas said.

"Said I heared it. Hearing and knowing is different things."

Camp walked around the bar and knocked on one of the wooden kegs that lined the shelf. "They left some grog."

He grabbed a mug and drew it full. In the fading light, the lager looked like piss, flat and cloudy. Camp wrinkled his nose and took a drink without bothering to remove his chaw. He swished the ale around and swallowed.

"Any good?" Lucas asked, eyeing the stairs, expecting some grazed-over jackaroo to come stumbling down the stairs with his pants around his ankles.

"Nope," said Camp, but he quickly drained the rest of his glass and refilled it.

Lucas pulled a stool out from the bar and sat down. He thought about trying the ale, but decided against it. Night was nearly here, and he didn't want to be slowed down by drunkenness. "What do we do for a bite?"

"Well, we can't eat no mutton, that's for damned sure."

"I've been eating kangaroo. Hasn't karked me yet, but I used up the last of it a couple of days ago. Thought about killing a rabbit, but it's hard to bang one with a pistol."

"How do you know rabbits don't got it, same as the sheep?"

"Rabbits haven't been eating people."

"Least as far as you know."

Lucas had to nod in agreement.

Camp gulped down another mugful and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Nearly time."

Lucas nodded again. "Saw a general store up the street. Might have some rifles and ammo."

Camp pulled another ale, the yeasty stench filling the room. Or maybe it was Camp himself that stank. "You go ahead. I'm aiming to knock back one or two more, to get my nerve up."

Lucas got off the stool and went outside, pausing on the porch to make sure no sheep had strayed from the herd. The sun was almost gone now, the west streaked with purple and pink rags. It had been three weeks since Lucas had last watched a sunset without dread crawling through his bones. Three weeks since a sheep was just a sheep. Things go full-on berko real fast.

He went up the street, his hand on the butt of his revolver. Something rustled in an alley to his left. He spun and drew, his hand trembling. A crumpled hat blew out into the street. He sagged in relief.

He shook like a blue-assed fly in a windstorm. He pulled the brim of his hat low over his eyes, glad no one was around to see him like this. Word got around fast when a fellow broke down.

A small rise of land to the left was bathed in the dying sunlight. A few wooden crosses still stood askew, but the picket fence marking off the cemetery had been trampled into ruin. Wadanetta's boneyard had been plowed up by gut-hungry sheep. Lucas pictured a whole herd of them, pawing and snorting to bust into those pine boxes and get at the goods inside.

He hurried to the general store. It was just as desolate as the knock shop had been. Cobwebs hung on the shelves, but he found a few blankets and a box of bullets for the revolver. All the rifles were gone. Some money was left in the register. Lucas didn't take it.

Camp staggered into the store, his Remington over his shoulder. "Could have told you they'd be no rifles," he said, his words slurred. "I took the last one."

"Bloody hell? You been here before?"

"We'd best get over to the jail. Sheep smell us, they'll be going crazy. They might be able to climb stairs, I don't know. But they sure as hell can't bust through steel bars."

They went into the street again, Camp leading the way. A soft bleating swept in from across the plateau. It was followed by another, then more of the man-eating sheep raised their voices.

"Ever wonder who's riding herd on them things?" Camp asked, not slowing.

Lucas looked behind them and saw a dust cloud roiling on the horizon. Appeared to be several hundred of them. The drum of hoofbeats filled the air. He hoped the jail was well-built.

"I mean, you figure it's the devil or something?" Camp said, belching. "A sister from Lady of the Faith Church told me them which don't repent would have the devil to pay someday. Figure maybe someday's finally here?"

"I don't deadcert know," Lucas said, his voice thin from fright. Darkness was settling like molasses, clogging Lucas' lungs and tightening his throat. He saw the jail and almost wept in relief. It was brick, squat, and solid, with iron bars across the windows.

Camp pulled a key from his pocket and opened the thick wooden door. A pungent odor struck Lucas like a fist. The stink reminded him of something, but the hoofbeats were so much louder now that they filled his senses, bounced around in his skull, drove every thought from his brain but the thought of sanctuary.

He stumbled into the dark room and Camp closed the door behind them. Camp dropped a crossbar into place, then shook it in its hasps. "Safe as milk," he said. "Let's see them woolly-eyed buggers bust into here."

Lucas bumped into a table. He ran his hands over its surface. Something fell to the floor and glass shattered. Flies buzzed around his head.

"Damn," Camp said. "You busted my lamp."

The stench was stronger, so thick that Lucas could barely breathe. The herd was closer now, stampeding into Wadanetta, a hundred haunted bahs bleating from bottomless mouths.

Camp's voice came from somewhere near the wall. "I like to watch them come in," he said. "They's something lovely about it. 'Specially when the moon's up, and all them eyes are sparkling."

Lucas put his hands over his ears, squeezing tight to drive out the noises of the stampede. He thought of all the people who had filled those bellies, who had been stomped and ground into haggis, who had served as leg of lamb for this devil's herd. The first of the horns rattled off the brick. The building shook, but Camp laughed.

"They can't get us in here," the old man shouted over the din. "You'd figure the dumb bastards would quit trying. But night after night they come back. Guess I ought to quit encouraging them."

A match flared. Camp's face showed in the orange circle of light. He was beside the window, grinning, his rotted teeth like mossy tombstones. The Remington was pointed at Lucas' heart.

Lucas forgot about the sheep. He'd had guns pointed at him a time or two before. But never like this, with his guard so far down. He was in no shape for a quick draw.

"Don't try it," Camp said. "You might be fast, maybe not, but you're not likely faster than a bullet."

Horn and snout hammered against the window bars. Camp put the bobbing matchlight to the end of a candle. The room grew a little brighter, and Lucas saw what stank so badly.

Naked bodies, three of them, hanging upside down inside one of the cells. Chains were wrapped around their ankles. One of them might have been a woman, judging from the swells in the red rags of flesh, but Lucas couldn't be sure. His heartbeat matched the rumble of the herd outside.

"Remember out there, when I rescued you, and I said I don't like to see a man get ate up?" Camp said, his voice as low and sinister as that of the sheep. "Don't like to let good meat go to waste, seeing as how it's getting so scarce and all. This free-range hunting is hell on an old man like me."

Camp sat on a chair, the rifle barrel steady. Lucas held his hands apart. He could see the tabletop, scarred and pitted, a dark and thick liquid on it. A nun's habit was folded over the back of a chair.

"Our Sister of the Lady of the Faith," Camp said, picking at his teeth with a thumbnail. "Mighty good eating. Figure it's the pureness of the flesh what makes it so sweet."

Lucas wouldn't have minded going down from a bullet. In fact, he'd always suspected that's the way he'd meet the Lord. Beat getting eaten by a Merino any day. But to know that this greasy bugger would be carving him into dinner portions was more than he could stomach.

"Hell, it's the way of things," Camp said, tilting back in his chair. "People eat sheep, then sheep eat people. What's so wrong about people eating people?"

Something slammed against the door, and two horn tips poked from the wood beneath the crossbar. Camp turned to look, and Lucas knew it was time. He rolled to his left, filling his hand with his oldest friend the revolver, and squeezed off three rounds without thinking. Camp gave a gasp of pain and the Remington clattered to the floor.

Lucas lifted himself up and blew the smoke from the revolver's barrel. Camp slumped in the chair, holes in his chest. The scent of fresh blood aroused the herd, and heads butted frantically against the brick walls. Camp's eyes flickered, the light in them dying like the last stars of morning.

Lucas wondered how long the herd would mill around. Daylight usually made them get scarce, but one or two of the orneriest would probably hang around. Maybe they'd get rewarded for their trouble, if they just happened to find some fresh meat out on the porch. One thing for sure, Camp would be nothing but gristle and rawhide. Hardly worth fooling with.

Lucas sat at the table. He'd heard that other people had turned to it, but the thought had sickened him. Until he'd run out of kangaroo. Hardly seemed unreasonable anymore, even for a man who followed the Lord. Camp's logic of the food chain fit right in with these balls-up times. And his stomach was squealing with all the intensity of a fresh-branded sheep.

Camp had been a fine butcher. The meat was thin and tender. Lucas stuck Camp's butcher knife into a slice and held it under his nose, checking its scent. Hell, not much different from mutton, when you got right down to it. His belly ached from need, and he wondered if that's how the sheep felt.

He chewed thoughtfully. The taste wasn't worth savoring, but it wasn't so terrible that he spat it out. He speared a second piece and held it up to the candlelight.

"You know, Sister," he addressed the meat. "Maybe you were right. Someday might just be here after all."

Maybe the Good Book was right, too, that the meek were busy inheriting the earth at this very moment. Lucas figured it would be humble and proper to offer up a word of prayerful thanks. He bowed his head in silence, then continued with the meal that the Holy Father had provided.

Outside, in the dark ghost town of Wadanetta, the chorus of sheep voiced its eternal hunger.

MURDERMOUTH

By Scott Nicholson

If only they had taken my tongue.

With no tongue, I would not taste this world. The air in the tent is buttered by the mist from popcorn. Cigarette smoke drifts from outside, sweet with candy apples and the liquor that the young men have been drinking. The drunken ones laugh the hardest, but their laughter always turns cruel.

If they only knew how much I love them. All of them, the small boys whose mothers pull them by the collar away from the cage, the plump women whose hair reflects the torchlight, the men all trying to act as if they are not surprised to see a dead man staring at them with hunger dripping from his mouth.

“Come and see the freak,” says the man who cages me, his hands full of dollar bills.

Freak. He means me. I love him.

More people press forward, bulging like sausages against the confines of their skin. The salt from their sweat burns my eyes. I wish I could not see.

But I see more clearly now, dead, than I ever did while breathing. I know this is wrong, that my heart should beat like a trapped bird, that my veins should throb in my temples, that blood should sluice through my limbs. Or else, my eyes should go forever dark, the pounding stilled.

“He doesn’t look all that weird,” says a long-haired man in denim overalls. He spits brown juice into the straw that covers the ground.

“Seen one like him up at Conner’s Flat,” says a second, whose breath falls like an ill wind. “I hear there’s three in Asheville, in freak shows like this.”

The long-haired man doesn’t smell my love for him. “Them scientists and their labs, cooking up all kinds of crazy stuff, it’s a wonder something like this ain’t happened years ago.”

The second man laughs and points at me and I want to kiss his finger. “This poor bastard should have been put out of his misery like the rest of them. Looks like he wouldn’t mind sucking your brains out of your skull.”

“Shit, that’s nothing,” says a third, this one as big around as one of the barrels that the clowns use for tricks. “I seen a woman in Parson’s Ford, she’d take a hunk out of your leg faster than you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle.’”

“Sounds like your ex-wife,” says the first man to the second. The three of them laugh together.

“A one hundred percent genuine flesh-eater,” says my barker. His eyes shine like coins. He is proud of his freak.

“He looks like any one of us,” calls a voice from the crowd. “You know. Normal.”

“Say, pardnuh, you wouldn’t be taking us for a ride, would you?” says the man as big as a barrel.

For a moment, I wonder if perhaps some mistake has been made, that I am in my bed, dreaming beside my wife. I put my hand to my chest. No heartbeat. I put a finger in my mouth.

“I’m as true as an encyclopedia,” says my barker.

“Look at the bad man, Mommy,” says a little girl. I smile at her, my mouth wet with desire. She shrieks and her mother leans forward and picks her up. I spit my finger out and stare at it, lying there pale against the straw, slick and shiny beneath the guttering torches.

Several of the women moan, the men grunt before they can stop themselves, the children lean closer, jostle for position. One slips, a yellow-haired boy with tan skin and meat that smells like soap. For an instant, his hands grip the bars of the cage. He fights for balance.

I love him so much, I want to make him happy, to please him. I crawl forward, his human stink against my tongue as I try to kiss him. Too quickly, a man has yanked him away. A woman screams and curses first at him, then at me.

The barker beats at the bars with his walking stick. “Get back, freak.”

I cover my face with my hands, as he has taught me. The crowd cheers. I hunch my back and shiver, though I have not been cold since I took my final breath. The barker pokes me with the stick, taunting me. Our eyes meet and I know what to do next. I pick my finger off the ground and return it to my mouth. The crowd sighs in satisfaction.

The finger has not much flavor. It is like the old chicken hearts the barker throws to me at night after the crowd has left. Pieces of flesh that taste of dirt and chemicals. No matter how much of it I eat, I still hunger.

The crowd slowly files out of the tent. In the gap beyond the door, I see the brightly-spinning wheels of light, hear the bigger laughter, the bells and shouts as someone wins at a game. With so much amusement, a freak like me cannot hope to hold their attention for long. And still I love them, even when they are gone and all that’s left is the stench of their shock and repulsion.

The barker counts his money, stuffs it in the pocket of his striped trousers. “Good trick there, with the finger. You’re pretty smart for a dead guy.”

I smile at him. I love him. I wish he would come closer to the bars, so I could show him how much I want to please him. I pleased my last barker. He screamed and screamed, but my love was strong, stronger than those who tried to pull him away.

The barker goes outside the tent to try and find more people with money. His voice rings out, mixes with the organ waltzes and the hum of the big diesel engines. The tent is empty and I feel something in my chest. Not the beating, beating, beating like before I died. This is more like the thing I feel in my mouth and stomach. I need. I put my finger in my mouth, even though no one is watching.

The juggler comes around a partition. The juggler is called Juggles and he wears make-up and a dark green body stocking. His painted eyes make his face look small. “Hey, Murdermouth,” he says.

I don’t remember the name I had when I was alive, but Murdermouth has been a favorite lately. I smile at him and show him my teeth and tongue. Juggles comes by every night when the crowds thin out.

“Eating your own damned finger,” Juggles says. He takes three cigarettes from a pocket hidden somewhere in his body stocking. In a moment, the cigarettes are in the air, twirling, Juggles’ bare toes a blur of motion. Then one is in his mouth, and he leans forward and lights it from a torch while continuing to toss the other two cigarettes.

He blows smoke at me. “What’s it like to be dead?”

I wish I could speak. I want to tell him, I want to tell them all. Being dead has taught me how to love. Being dead has shown me what is really important on this earth. Being dead has saved my life.

“You poor schmuck. Ought to put a bullet in your head.” Juggles lets the cigarette dangle from his lips. He lights one of the others and flips it into my cage with his foot. “Here you go. Suck on that for a while.”

I pick up the cigarette and touch its orange end. My skin sizzles and I stare at the wound as the smoke curls into my nose. I put the other end of the cigarette in my mouth. I cannot breathe so it does no good.

“Why are you so mean to him?”

It is she. Her voice comes like hammers, like needles of ice, like small kisses along my skin. She stands at the edge of the shadows, a shadow herself. I know that if my heart could beat it would go crazy.

“I don’t mean nothing,” says Juggles. He exhales and squints against the smoke, then sits on a bale of straw. “Just having a little fun.”

“Fun,” she says. “All you care about is fun.”

“What else is there? None of us are going anywhere.”

She steps from the darkness at the corner of the tent. The torchlight is golden on her face, flickering playfully among her chins. Her breath wheezes like the softest of summer winds. She is beautiful. My Fat Lady.

The cigarette burns between my fingers. The fire reaches my flesh. I look down at the blisters, trying to remember what pain felt like. Juice leaks from the wounds and extinguishes the cigarette.

“He shouldn’t be in a cage,” says the Fat Lady. “He’s no different from any of us.”

“Except for that part about eating people.”

“I wonder what his name is.”

“You mean ‘was,’ don’t you? Everything’s in the past for him.”

The Fat Lady squats near the cage. Her breasts swell with the effort, lush as moons. She stares at my face, into my eyes. I crush the cigarette in my hand and toss it to the ground.

“He knows,” she says. “He can still feel. Just because he can’t talk doesn’t mean he’s an idiot. Whatever that virus was that caused this, it’s a hundred times worse than being dead.”

“Hell, if I had arms, I’d give him a hug,” mocks Juggles.

“You and your arms. You think you’re the only one that has troubles?” The Fat Lady wears lipstick, her mouth is a red gash against her pale, broad face. Her teeth are straight and healthy. I wish she would come closer.

“Crying over that Murdermouth is like pissing in a river. At least he brings in a few paying customers.”

The Fat Lady stares deeply into my eyes. I try to blink, to let her know I’m in here. She sees me. She sees me.

“He’s more human than you’ll ever be,” the Fat Lady says, without turning her head.

“Oh, yeah? Give us both a kiss and then tell me who loves you.” He has pulled a yellow ball from somewhere and tosses it back and forth between his feet. “Except you better kiss me first because you probably won’t have no lips left after him.”

“He would never hurt me,” she says. She smiles at me. “Would you?”

I try to think, try to make my mouth around the word. My throat. All my muscles are dumb, except for my tongue. I taste her perfume and sweat, the oil of her hair, the sex she had with someone.

Voices spill from the tent flap. The barker is back, this time with only four people. Juggles hops to his feet, balances on one leg while saluting the group, then dances away. He doesn’t like the barker.

“Hello, Princess Tiffany,” says the barker.

The Fat Lady grins, rises slowly, groans with the effort of lifting her own weight. I love all of her.

“For a limited time only, a special attraction,” shouts the barker in his money-making voice. “The world’s fattest woman and the bottomless Murdermouth, together again for the very first time.”

The Fat Lady waves her hand at him, smiles once more at me, then waddles toward the opening in the tent. She waits for a moment, obliterating the bright lights beyond the tent walls, then enters the clamor and madness of the crowd.

“Too bad,” says the barker. “A love for the ages.”

“Goddamn, I’d pay double to see that,” says one of the group.

“Quadruple,” says the barker. “Once for each chin.”

The group laughs, then falls silent as all eyes turn to me.

The barker beats on the cage with his stick. “Give them a show, freak.”

I eat the finger again. It is shredded now and bits of dirt and straw stick to the knuckle. Two of the people, a man and a woman, hug each other. The woman makes a sound like her stomach is bad. Another man, the one who would pay double, says, “Do they really eat people?”

“Faster than an alligator,” says my barker. “Why, this very one ingested my esteemed predecessor in three minutes flat. Nothing left but two pounds of bones and a shoe.”

“Doesn’t look like much to me,” says the man. “I wouldn’t be afraid to take him on.”

He calls to the man with him, who wobbles and smells of liquor and excrement. “What do you think? Ten-to-one odds.”

“Maynard, he’d munch your ass so fast you’d be screaming ‘Mommy’ before you knew what was going on,” says the wobbling man.

Maynard’s eyes narrow and he turns to the barker. “What do you say? I’ll give you a hundred bucks. Him and me, five minutes.”

My barker points the stick toward the tent ceiling. “Five minutes. In the cage with that thing?”

“I heard about these things,” says the man. “Don’t know if I believe it.”

My mouth tastes his courage and his fear. He is salt and meat and brains and kidneys. He is one of them. I love him.

He takes the stick from the barker and pokes me in the shoulder.

“That’s not sporting,” says the barker. He looks at the man and woman, who have gone pale and taken several steps toward the door.

Maynard rattles the stick against the bars and pokes me in the face. I hear a tearing sound. The woman screams and the man shouts beside her, then they run into the night. Organ notes trip across the sky, glittering wheels tilt, people laugh. The crowd is thinning for the night.

Maynard fishes in his pocket and pulls out some bills. “What do you say?”

“I don’t know if it’s legal,” says the barker.

“What do you care? Plenty more where he came from.” Maynard breathes heavily. I smell poison spilling from inside him.

“It ain’t like it’s murder,” says Maynard’s drunken companion.

The barker looks around, takes the bills. “After the crowd’s gone. Come back after midnight and meet me by the duck-hunting gallery.”

Maynard reaches the stick into the bars, rakes my disembodied finger out of the cage. He bends down and picks it up, sniffs it, and slides it into his pocket. “A little return on my investment,” he says.

The barker takes the stick from Maynard and wipes it clean on his trouser leg. “Show’s over, folks,” he yells, as if addressing a packed house.

“Midnight,” Maynard says to me. “Then it’s you and me, freak.”

The wobbly man giggles as they leave the tent. The barker waits by the door for a moment, then disappears. I look into the torchlight, watching the flames do their slow dance. I wonder what the fire tastes like.

The Fat Lady comes. She must have been hiding in the shadows again. She has changed her billowy costume for a large robe. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders, her face barren of make-up.

She sees me. She knows I can understand her. “I heard what they said.”

I stick out my tongue. I can taste the torn place on my cheek. I grip the bars with my hands. Maybe tomorrow, I will eat my hands, then my arms. Then I can be like Juggles. Except you can’t dance when you’re dead.

Or maybe I will eat and eat when the barker brings me the bucket of chicken hearts. If I eat enough, I can be the World’s Fattest Murdermouth. I can be one of them. I will take money for the rides and pull the levers and sell cotton candy.

If I could get out of this cage, I would show her what I could do. I would prove my love. If I could talk, I would tell her.

The Fat Lady watches the tent flap. Somewhere a roadie is working on a piece of machinery, cursing in a foreign language. The smell of popcorn is no longer in the air. Now there is only cigarette smoke, cheap wine, leftover hot dogs. The big show is putting itself to bed for the night.

“They’re going to kill you,” she whispers.

I am already dead. I have tasted my own finger. I should be eating dirt instead. Once, I could feel the pounding of my heart.

“You don’t deserve this.” Her eyes are dark. “You’re not a freak.”

My barker says a freak is anybody that people will pay money to see.

My tongue presses against my teeth. I can almost remember. They put me in a cage before I died. I had a name.

The Fat Lady wraps her fingers around the metal catch. From somewhere she has produced a key. The lock falls open and she whips the chain free from the bars.

“They’re coming,” she says. “Hurry.”

I smell them before I see them. Maynard smells like Maynard, as if he is wearing his vital organs around his waist. The wobbling man reeks even worse of liquor. The barker has also been drinking. The three of them laugh like men swapping horses.

I taste the straw in the air, the diesel exhaust, the smoke from the torches, the cigarette that Juggles gave me, my dead finger, the cold gun in Maynard’s pocket, the money my barker has spent.

I taste and taste and taste and I am hungry.

“Hey, get away from there,” yells the barker. He holds a wine bottle in one hand.

The Fat Lady pulls on the bars. The front of the cage falls open. I can taste the dust.

“Run,” says the Fat Lady.

Running is like dancing. Maybe people will pay money to see me run.

“What the hell?” says Maynard.

I move forward, out of the cage. This is my tent. My name is on a sign outside. If I see the sign, I will know who I am. If I pay money, maybe I can see myself.

“This ain’t part of the deal,” says Maynard. He draws the gun from his pocket. The silver barrel shines in the firelight.

The Fat Lady turns and faces the three men.

“I swear, I didn’t know anything about this,” says the barker.

“Leave him alone,” says the Fat Lady.

Maynard waves the gun. “Get out of the way.”

This is my tent. I am the one they came to see. The Fat Lady blocks the way. I stare at her broad back, at the dark red robe, her long hair tumbling down her neck. She’s the only one who ever treated me like one of them.

I jump forward, push her. The gun roars, spits a flash of fire from its end. She cries out. The bullet cuts a cold hole in my chest.

I must die again, but at last she is in my arms.

If my mouth could do more than murder, it would say words.

I am sorry. I love you.

They take her bones when I am finished.

THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SURVIVAL SCORECARD

By Jonathan Maberry

So…how do our chances stack up if the dead rose?

The answers depend on how the dead rise and what kind of zombies we’d be facing, and unless you’re a Romero purist, there are a lot of variations to consider. Here’s a summary of the major zombie sub-types along with some projections of how the 21st century human race would do in a battle with the hungry dead.

SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF A PLAGUE.

This is the most common variation on the standard George Romero model, and it’s a far more plausible and practicable one. These zombies are the slow shufflers. They have very little brain function; they have poor balance; they fear fire; it takes a headshot to bring them done.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Very high, but it would follow well-established epidemic spread patterns beginning with a Patient Zero and then increasing exponentially. Each vector would have the potential for unlimited contamination of human victims; each victim would become a disease vector upon reviving from human death.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Depending on where the infection begins, the spread of disease may be easily containable. In Resident Evil, for example, the disease would have been contained within the Vault had not human greed and a short-sighted desire to weaponize the disease overridden common sense and the sensible precautions built into all disease study and bio-weapons research. If the disease begins spreading in a small town there is the possibility of quarantine and purification (read: nuking the crap out of the town).

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Humans are smarter, faster, capable of using technology, and possess the ability to share information and form cooperative resistance. (Though in the movies they fail miserably at all of this so the movie zoms can ultimately win. Though this was a brilliant if cynical view put forward by Romero in Dawn and Day, the apocalypse-due-to-petty-humans theme has been way overused).

Considering the efficiency of military and local law enforcement and the sophistication of their weapons and tactics, there is a solid chance that we would stay ahead of the undead tsunami and eventually win. Call it a survival likelihood of 85-95 percent.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: A lot of things would have to go wrong, more than just pettiness and in-fighting, for us to screw the pooch so badly that we’d all become dinner for the dead.

SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF TOXIC CONTAMINATION.

A number of films, with both slow and fast zombies, play the toxic spill card, as shown in films like The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, The Grapes of Death, and Toxic Zombie.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: The severity of the outbreak depends on the number of people initially contaminated. If something gets into the water or major food source of a large population, then the outbreak could spin out of control.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Very little except that beyond the initial contamination of one or more Patient Zeroes the disease would spread by one-to-one bite attacks.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Even if an entire city is infected there would be slow-down points, such as bridges, tunnels, rivers, mountains, etc. Each of these could be used as a combat zone for hard-fire elimination of the infected. If more than a 5 percent population of a large city becomes simultaneously contaminated, then the military would need to use weapons of mass destruction in order to sterilize large geographic sections. Fuel air bombs would be the first choice, with nukes as a last-case fallback plan.

Continental survival following a 5 percent-plus infection would be 50-50. Oceans would stop the global spread. If, however, the toxic contamination affects a very small group (such as the staff at a toxic dump site or the population of a small and/or moderately isolated town), then our chances of survival jump to 95 percent or better.

In either case there will likely be a high percentage of non-infected fatalities during the sterilization process.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: See above.

SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF UNEXPLAINED RADIATION.

This results in all of the recently deceased coming back to life. This is the classic George A. Romero Night of the Living Dead scenario. These zombies are the slow shufflers. They have very little brain function; they have poor balance; they fear fire; it takes a headshot to bring them done.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: The premise is that the radiation somehow permeates the entire atmosphere at roughly the same time. In that case, the risk for a global pandemic is absolute.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: None. This scenario even eliminates hold-out areas such as remote islands, fortified bases, etc.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Zero, except at facilities hardened against radiation.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Virtually 100%. For storytellers interested in spinning a truly apocalyptic zombie story then the classic Night scenario is the way to go. But it’s so completely unwinnable as to almost inspire a ‘who cares?’ response. Everyone dies, therefore everyone will become a zombie…whether now or in forty years, so what’s the point of fighting for survival.

It would be the same as taking a week’s worth of food and locking yourself in a radiation-proof room during a worldwide nuclear war: sure, you’d survive for a week, but so what? The futility of this was eloquently explored in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend; but even here the author relents from total fatalism by providing a new ‘humanity’ to inherit the earth once the original tenants have all been evicted.

When writing the script for Night, Romero was undoubtedly not thinking of launching either a franchise or a genre, and from a creative standpoint the “all recent dead rise” mythology painted him into a corner. In the later films Romero subtly backed off from this stance. It may still have been part of his mythology, but he didn’t belabor the point, or even raise it again as it negates the point of all resistance. Instead the infection through bite scenario was used.

FAST ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A PLAGUE.

This is the premise of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Something starts the plague and it spreads very, very fast. Victims who die as a result of bites reanimate within seconds and they retain human speed and coordination.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Less likely than shown in the movie unless a lot of folks with bites suddenly hop onto airplanes to visit foreign countries. Once the disease becomes known in one country the governments of neighboring countries would react the same way they would to a military coup: they’re seal their borders, start pointing missiles and very likely consider pressing those big red buttons. If things got out of hand it would be a race to see whether the plague or radioactive fallout would claim the most lives.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Most likely it would become an overwhelming disaster within the confines of connected continents. North and South America would fall within days or weeks if the infection starts there. Same with Australia. Since Europe and Asia are connected by shared borders any plague that starts there would consume that land mass. Rough terrain (mountains, ice, oceans, big rivers, etc.) would form natural barriers and allow for humans to regroup and make a coordinated stand.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Slim to none unless the nature of the threat is identified (and believed) early on. The disease spreads too fast to allow much reaction, study, preparation and response. It’s the same nihilistic view as the radiation raising all the dead, and from the storytelling point of view there is only one story to tell. At best you can try for episodic survivor tales, but that’s it.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: There are two views on this. If you stick to the mythology as shown in the Dawn remake, then yeah, we’re toast; but since the disease in that film doesn’t operate the way any disease is likely to act, then we probably have a shot. No matter how virulent and aggressive a disease is, there has to be time for it to spread through the bloodstream.

The thought that an infected person reanimates after hours or days is plausible; and the fact that they reanimate quickly makes some degree of sense, especially in justifying why they are fast and more coordinated: they are not in rigor yet and they’ve suffered significantly less damage to the brain. Fewer brain cells have died and therefore more of their motor cortex is working even if cognition is diminished.

But the thought that a person who is bitten to death immediately reanimates and as a completely infectious vector is less likely. If they die from a bite to the throat (as does Anna’s husband in Dawn) and bleeds out from a torn artery, there won’t have been time for the disease to have taken hold throughout the entire body.

The mouth won’t yet contain a sufficient (if any) amount of the pathogen to make them an instant carrier for the disease. So, the whole scenario where the disease spreads out of control and everyone immediately becomes a murderous zombie doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Makes a helluva movie, though.

FAST, THINKING ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT GONE WRONG.

This is the Return of the Living Dead model, and it has other tweaks on the model. The infected die over a period of a few hours and then reanimate as fully cognizant zombies. They can think, talk, strategies and work cooperatively. They also have a desire to eat only human brains, and their own bodies are remarkably difficult to kill.

Even severed limbs are active, as if every cell in the body has become a separate being. How this works with an arm detached from the central nervous system, not to mention the supportive and cooperative structures of the rest of the shoulder’s tendons and bones, is a bit hard to explain (which is why even as a kid I always thought that films like The Crawling Hand were just plain silly).

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: If we accept the mythology in its entirety, then the spread of the disease begins as a standard one-to-one outbreak with pandemic potential; but when we add to this a deliberate and hostile intelligence then it becomes a battle on the level of ethnic genocide.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Whomever has the best weapons will win; but with an enemy that can never be completely destroyed (even ash from incineration is a contaminant), there is no foreseen limit to the spread of the disease.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Unless it starts on an island or in some place that can be contained without using incineration (and that depends on how fast we can erect a fifty-foot high concrete wall around an entire town), then our chances of stopping it would be very small.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Isolated communities capable of fortification may survive until the zombies acquire weapons. And even that fifty-foot high concrete wall will yield to a tank or fifty determined thinking zombies with jack-hammers.

FAST HUMAN ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A VIRUS.

This was the model used in George A. Romero’s The Crazies (and its remake) and in 28 Days Later. An event --a government experiment gone wrong in Crazies and a rage virus accidentally released in 28 Days Later—results in a rash of savage murders. The infected humans, especially in recent films, are incapable of controlled or rational thought and are, for all intents and purposes, fast zombies –even if they are technically alive.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Like Dawn the premise requires that we accept that infection spreads instantly and completely through the entire body within seconds of contamination. This is the case in 28 Days Later but not so in the Crazies (the disease is in the local drinking water).

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: The model from The Crazies is less destructive in that it has to enter the water and has to be consumed. Unless it is spread to other bodies of water by runoff, drainage, or (more devastatingly) rainfall, the problem could be contained to a limited area.

The 28 Days Later model is much worse but also unlikely. More likely the process of individual infection would take hours during which the infected would experience a decrease in rational behavior and an increase in hostility. Triage and quarantine would come later once order is restored.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Since a real disease needs a lag time of a few hours this would likely spin out of control when it first presents, but once a crisis is identified there are infrastructural disaster procedures in place at the local, state and federal levels. Losses would be high, and among them would be many uninfected who would be killed because the initial military responses would have to take a big-picture view of containment. However this applies to the Crazies model. If a disease could exist and spread with the rapidity shown in 28 Days Later, then, adios muchacho.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: If things were handled with the lack of military efficiency shown in the movies, then the whole world would go down in less than a year, except for isolated islands and fortified pockets. But I doubt that any military would crumble as easily as the occupying U.S. military does in 28 Weeks Later.

Some of my military chums tell me they groaned louder than a hungry zom when they saw the way military tactics were portrayed in that flick. Though they all liked the movie from a fan point of view, they all agreed that no one would ever have made it out of England (as they did in the film, using a stolen military helicopter).

Captain Dick Taylor, US Army (retired) put it this way: “Knowing the potential for a global disaster, anything—and I mean anything—flying out of that country, especially after a known outbreak, and not heading directly to a secure quarantine spot, would be shot out of the sky before they cleared the outbound coastline. There is not the slightest doubt about it.”

DELIBERATELY REANIMATED DEAD.

Authors and film-makers have been kicking this concept around for a long time, and there are some zombie experts who consider Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published in 1918, to be the very first entry in this sub-genre. There’s some weight to the argument since it does involve the dead being brought back to life and, once revived, demonstrates decidedly hostile tendencies.

In the H. P Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a scientist’s attempts to create a reagent that will restore life to the dead backfires resulting in reanimated but mindless and aggressive corpses who bear a striking resemblance to the flesh-eating ghouls of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Director Stuart Gordon filmed this as Re-Animator in 1985 based on a script he co-wrote with Dennis Paoli and William Norris, and in this landmark film the zombie element was played up, both for laughs and for real shocks. These creatures are typically very strong, uncontrollably violent, but they can be destroyed.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Only moderate.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: The dead are reanimated during a scientific process (electrochemistry in Frankenstein; injections of a reagent in Re-Animator; etc.) which means that any spread would be very slow unless a more efficient process was developed.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Once the threat is known, then any armed response would likely end things pretty quickly.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Slim to none.

DEMON ZOMBIES.

Movies like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series and books like Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead use demonic forces as the reason the dead rise. The demons of Evil Dead possess dead (and sometimes living) bodies and turn them into raging, bloodthirsty killing machines that can only be stopped by cutting them into harmless pieces. In the Keene novels, the demons inhabit all dead things, including insects and animals. Destroying the body of one does little since the demonic force can just switch to another host.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Absolute.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: None.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Not a chance.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Prepare to meet thy Maker.

REVENGE ZOMBIES.

These are stories of the dead returning to life in order to redress some wrong or to resolve some unfinished business. The waterlogged zombies of Creepshow have come back for revenge; as is the sort-of-a-cyborg zombie in Deadly Friend. In the Blind Dead series, a bunch of slaughtered Knights Templar return from the grave to exact revenge on descendants of the villagers in whose town the knights were murdered.

In many of these stories the logic is warped in that there is supposed to be a need for justice so powerful that not even the grave can bar the way, and yet too often the murder spree of the zombies continues on long after the right is wrong, or more often, a large number of uninvolved civilians are killed just to satisfy the body-count fix of the audience.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Small, if any.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: These cases tend to be localized incidents.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: There’s a long and valued tradition of villagers with torches. Seems to work pretty well.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: None.

ALIEN ZOMBIES.

This is a storytelling form that allows all known rules of science to be quietly chucked out the window by taking the stance that “It all makes sense if it comes from outer space.” In some cases this is just lazy storytelling, as in dreck like the 1969 el cheapo film Astro-Zombies (with John Carradine) and Fred Olin Ray’s 1980 piece o’ junk Alien Dead and the all time worst film ever, Plan 9 From Outer Space.

On the other hand, it’s been used to great effect for storylines like the Marvel Zombies series of comic books (written by Robert Kirkman, Fre Van Lente, David Wellington, Seth Grahame-Smith and me) in which an alien plague begins infecting all of the Marvel superheroes, including Spider-Man, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers). And the 2006 movie Slither, written and directed by James Gunn, dealt with a zombie outbreak caused by an alien organism that crash-lands on earth in a meteor.

POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: This varies depending on the type of infection. In Marvel Zombies the plague spreads as fast as it does in the films Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, and the problem is exacerbated by having super-powered zombies. That’s a no-win scenario; but in Slither and films of its genre the problem spreads with relative slowness.

LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Potentially none in all cases unless deliberately stopped.

LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: For Marvel Zombies it’s zero; for the others we stand a fair chance.

LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: For most of the genre, we have a shot at staying alive; but if a zombified Incredible Hulk shows up at your door, just pack it in.

###

JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author and Marvel Comics writer. His works include the bestsellers PATIENT ZERO (St. Martin’s Griffin; in development for ABC TV), THE WOLFMAN (Tor Books; based on the hit movie), ZOMBIE CSU and WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE (Citadel Press); The Pine Deep Trilogy (GHOST ROAD BLUES, DEAD MAN’S SONG and BAD MOON RISING; Kensington Books); and ROT & RUIN (Simon & Schuster). He was part of the writing team for the MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN (with Fred Van Lente, David Wellington and Seth Grahame-Smith) and writes Black Panther, DoomWar, Captain America, Deadpool and other comics for Marvel. His short fiction has been included in THE NEW DEAD, THE LIVING DEAD 2, HISTORY IS DEAD, NEW BLOOD and others. His books have been translated into over 20 languages. He is also a board member of the Zombie Research Society.

MURDERMOUTH: ISSUE ONE

A comic script by Scott Nicholson

Art by Derlis Santacruz

(You get be drawn as a zombie in our comic for a $25 donation to support the project. Visit http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/murdermouth for details.)

ARTIST NOTE: Post-apocalyptic world in which zombies are an endangered species—they are so rare they are kept as sideshow freaks. Murdermouth is one of the freaks—he is fully intelligent, caged against his will. But his intelligence is masked in a fog—he’s only dimly aware that he used to be human, and his hunger sometimes obscures his reason.

There is a running backstory of when Murdermouth was Lt. John Sorenson, a biological expert in the U.S. Army. The flashback effect will need a shimmering transition and some sort of visual effect to let the reader know we are in the past. (We can use a blue effect or a gray wash to make the difference clear). The flashbacks start with the most recent events and move backward in time as Murdermouth begins to remember more of his past. The flashbacks can also be in a slightly different art style. The longer he is a zombie, the more he remembers his human life and also the terrible things he did before he started becoming human again.

LETTERER NOTE: All CAPTIONS indicate description boxes. All TEXT is in the voice of Murdermouth, who is narrating the story. When Murdermoutyh speaks (later in the series, his dialogue is in jagged balloons.

TECH NOTE: Soldier weaponry is roughly modern—circa 2009. Since the Big War, there is little gasoline, no manufacturing, no electrical grid, no organized infrastructure. Horses are the main mode of transportation, except for the officers, who have cars or jeeps.

ZOMBIE RULES: Zombies are immune to bullets, except for the traditional method of killing zombies in which they “die” when their brains are destroyed. They are generally vacant-eyed and slack-mouthed, often with splotchy skin and ragged clothes. These are traditional Romero zombies, slow-moving—except they are intelligent and still have feelings, though they need flesh to suvive. They’ll eat the people they love. They have no real sense of right or wrong. Well, they know eating people is wrong, but they’re going to do it anyway. They’ll eat any flesh, dead or alive. Murdermouth doesn’t know it yet, but he’s different. He is a zombie with morality. He will only eat the unworthy. He becomes more intelligent when he eats, but the longer he goes without eating, the more he becomes monstrous and without a soul.

PAGE 1

Full splash of a carnival. There are several ragged, torn tents, and a horse-drawn coach like an old Snake Oil Salesman wagon. The wagon is covered with exotic symbols. In the background is a rusty ferris wheel—it hasn’t turned in years. Farther back, on the horizon, is a broken city skyline, a couple of plumes of smoke rising from it. This is a dying world, after the Big War, where the cruel make the rules and the weak just try to survive.

In the foreground walks a midget, smoking a cigar and carrying a machine gun. SERENA, 27 year-old woman with stringy hair and ragged clothes, hurries between the tents, dragging her little girl MELODY, 7, by the hand. The child dangles a rag doll whose stuffing is leaking out. A scrawny horse is tied to a dead tree. A monkey sits in the tree, staring down on the scene. In the foreground, two chickens fight over the ragged scrap of a chicken head.

TWO SOLDIERS with machine guns slung over their shoulders are flirting with a FAT LADY, who is laughing and holding a bottle of whiskey. One of the soldiers wears an EYE PATCH. An old-fashioned CARNIVAL BARKER in a top hat stands outside one of the tents, waving a wooden walking cane. Above the opening of the tent is a crude sign that says “Murdermouth.”

TEXT BOX: It’s 2017. Maybe 2018. Nobody cares which.

CARNIVAL BARKER: Come right in, ladies and gentlemen, see a marvel of the Twenty-First Century…in the flesh. Step right up, see the last of a dying breed…Right here, only eighty dollars American.”

TEXT BOX (bottom): Especially me.

PAGE 2

PANEL 1: View from inside the tent, looking out—the barker is visible from the back.

CARNIVAL BARKER: Come see Murdermouth. The only one for twenty miles.

TEXT BOX: Murdermouth. I used to be John. Maybe I still am.

PANEL 2: Same view, from deeper back, Murdermouth’s Point of View (POV)—we see the tent opening, only smaller. Now we see the bars of a cage, and two hands gripping the bars. The hands are nicked and scabbed, the fingernails ragged and dark—two fingers are missing on the left hand. There’s a flickering torch off to one side, the only light in the tent.

TEXT BOX: Maybe, like with the year, it don’t matter no more.

PANEL 3: Outside. The Carnival Barker, framed against the darkness of the tent opening.

CARNIVAL BARKER: Hey. Soldiers. I know you got money.

PANEL 4: The soldiers have moved closer to the Fat Lady. Eye Patch has his arm around her—at least, he’s trying, but she’s too big for him to get it all the way around. Her breasts are huge. Soldier #2 is taking the whiskey bottle from her.

ONE-EYED SOLDIER: I seen plenty of freaks for free.

PANEL 5: Soldier # 2 drinks, head tilted back, whiskey dribbling down his chin.

EYE PATCH SOLDIER (to Fat Lady): Hey, babe, how about a little fun?

TEXT: I taste the smoke, the sweat, the horses.

PANEL 6: Close-up of the Fat Lady.

FAT LADY: I’m a ton of fun, honey.

TEXT: She’ll do it cheap. She’s as starved for love as I am.

PAGE 3

PANEL 1: The barker yells at Serena, who is digging in a rusty, dented trash can. Her little girl plays with the doll.

CARNIVAL BARKER: You. Woman. Wanna peek?

PANEL 2: Serena pulls a rotten apple from the garbage can. Melody looks at it hungrily.

SERENA: I don’t have any money.

BARKER (leering): Maybe we can work a trade, sweetie. The kid looks hungry.

TEXT BOX: Kid? I had a kid once. Maybe several. Hard to remember. They all the taste the same.

PANEL 3: Medium Close-Up of Eye Patch.

EYE PATCH: Let the kid see.

PANEL 4: Eye Patch, Fat Lady, and Soldier #2, who is holding the bottle. Eye Patch points his rifle at the Carnival Barker, who is angry but scared.

EYE PATCH: Admission is free today.

PANEL 5: Serena protectively wraps her arms around the little girl, who protectively wraps her arms around the doll.

TEXT BOX: I love her already.

PANEL 6: Eye Patch, Fat Lady, and Soldier #2—the Fat Lady is giggling.

FAT LADY: This could be fun.

EYE PATCH: A ton of fun.

PANEL 7: Soldier # 2 tosses the bottle away.

SOLDIER #2: Let the kid see the freak. Or we’ll put on our own show.

PANEL 8: The barker stands aside as Serena and the little girl enter the tent, Eye Patch right behind them, his rifle pointed at their backs.

CARNIVAL BARKER: Careful. He gets cranky when he ain’t had dinner.

EYE PATCH: We’ll see about that.

TEXT BOX: I love them all.

PAGE 4

PANEL 1 (half splash): Inside the tent—Scene light by torches. Murdermouth in the cage, gripping the bars. His skin is mottled but not too rotten. He is missing the two fingers but otherwise is intact except a deep scar across his cheek. His eyes are intelligent but dark, like they’re troubled. He is a classic zombie, but not too far gone. His mouth is open just a little. He wears the rags of a soldier’s uniform. There are a few bones scattered on the straw-covered floor of the cage, but they don’t look human.

TEXT BOX: But you don’t love me. And I don’t blame you.

PANEL 2: The soldiers push the scared Melody toward the cage.

MELODY: Mommy!

EYE PATCH: Give ‘im a kiss.

PANEL 3: Serena tries to grab Melody, but the Fat Lady holds her back.

FAT LADY: No, you don’t, skin-and-bones. That’s my man.

TEXT: I love the big one.

PANEL 4: Eye Patch is dragging the girl toward the cage. Soldier #2 helps hold Serena, who is struggling to break free. Murdermouth is reaching through the bars with his good hand. The barker watches in the background.

SERENA: Leave her alone!

PAGE 5

PANEL 1: Eye Patch pushes Melody to the bars—but Eye Patch has lost his balance.

EYE PATCH: Goddammit.

PANEL 2: Murdermouth swipes his arm out, it passes over Melody’s head and scratches Eye Patch’s cheek. A few drops of blood spatter out.

EYE PATCH: Yowww.

PANEL 3: Eye Patch staggering back in pain, holding his cheek. Melody is frozen for a moment, within reach, eyes wide in fright.

PANEL 4: MEDIUM SHOT of Murdermouth, reaching for her. His face is fierce, eyes glittering with hunger.

PANEL 5: Wide view. Serena struggling, Eye Patch hunched in pain and holding his cheek, Soldier #2 and the Fat Lady grinning, the Barker

SERENA: Run…please, god…

PANEL 5: (these next panels focus on the interaction between the little girl and Murdermouth—she is vulnerable, easy prey, yet something changes in Murdermouth’s eyes, from hunger to confusion. Switch back and forth between their faces to show the change): Melody drops the doll.

TEXT: God.

PANEL 6: Murdermouth’s hand is open, scabbed, about to close on her face.

TEXT: Is great. God is good.

PANEL 8: Melody is frozen, pupils reflecting the torchlight.

TEXT: Let us thank him for…

PANEL 9: The fingers of the clutching hand relax a little.

TEXT: …for what?

PAGE 6

PANEL 1: Serena finally breaks free, Soldier #2 is mad but the Fat Lady is laughing. Eye Patch is lost in his own pain.

SOLDIER #2 (at Serena): Hey!

EYE PATCH (small letters trailing off): He got me…

PANEL 2: Murdermouth looks at his hand.

TEXT: For what?

PANEL 3: Serena yanks Melody away as Soldier#2 is getting his rifle in position to shoot. The barker is moving toward the soldier.

PANEL 4: As Soldier #2 fires, the barker shoves him.

BARKER: Don’t damage the merchandise.

SFX: KER-CHAWW (bleeds across next two panels)

PANEL 5: The bullet skrees past Serena and Melody’s heads…

SFX: …WWZZZZZ

PANEL 6: …and takes a small chunk of Murdermouth’s shoulder as it passes through.

SFX: …ZZZZIPPPP

PANEL 7: Soldier #2 raises his rifle as if he’s going to beat the barker.

SOLDIER #2: I’ll grind you to friggin’ sausage.

PANEL 8: The Fat Lady puts her hand on the soldier’s arm to stop him. The barker’s face shows relief.

FAT LADY: Hey, hon, be a lover, not a fighter.

PAGE 7

PANEL 1: Serena, kneeling, hugs Melody, who is sobbing.

MELODY: My dolly…

PANEL 2: The doll on the ground near Murdermouth’s ragged feet.

TEXT: Dolly.

PANEL 3: Soldier #2 is helping Eye Patch.

SOLDIER #2: He got ya, all right.

EYE PATCH: Christ, am I gonna get the freak disease?

PANEL 4: The Barker and Fat Lady gather around Eye Patch.

BARKER: Nah, he didn’t bite ya.

FAT LADY: Lucky for you.

PANEL 7: Eye Patch’s face, close up, his one eye is squinting in anger.

EYE PATCH: I’m gonna kill that son of a whore.

PANEL 8: Fat Lady smiles at him.

FAT LADY: Once I get my mouth on you, you’ll forget all about him.

PANEL 6: Serena is pulling Melody toward the tent entrance, but Melody is looking back at the cage. She is no longer crying but there are tears on her cheeks.

SERENA: Come on.

MELODY: I can’t leave Dolly.

PANEL 7: Murdermouth hunches down and reaches for the doll.

TEXT: Dolly.

PANEL 8: He grabs the doll and brings it to his mouth.

TEXT: I love Dolly.

PAGE 8

PANEL 1 (This page is a flashback so use an effect to show the transition—jagged borders or a different style of shading): Flashback scene—jagged borders of panel—Murdermouth in his human life as Lt. John Sorensen, giving his six-year-old daughter DOLORES a doll. John is in an officer’s uniform. His wife JULIE and oldest daughter MEGAN wait in the background. They are on the porch of a suburban house.

TEXT: John. Yeah, that was him. Me, I mean.

JOHN: You be good for your mommy, okay?

PANEL 2: Dolores hugs the doll to her cheek.

DOLORES: ‘kay, Daddy.

TEXT: Dolores. We called her “Dolly.”

PANEL 3: Dolores joins Julie and Megan.

JULIE: What’s happening, John?

JOHN: War. Like always. Now get in the car.

TEXT: Julie. Megan. I love them all.

PANEL 4: Julie by the open driver’s door of their car, John close by.

JULIE: How will you find us?

JOHN: I just will. Now go.

PANEL 5: Julie and John share a deep, frantic kiss.

TEXT: She tastes so damn good.

PANEL 5: John slams the door with Julie behind the wheel, Megan in the seat behind her.

JULIE: John, I--

JOHN: Drive north. They won’t get you there. And don’t look back.

PANEL 6: Panoramic view—street is packed with cars from other houses in the neighborhood, everyone’s leaving. There’s chaos, televisions on the sidewalk, backpacks, boxes of food, things people couldn’t fit in the car. John is waving goodbye, Dolly is visible through the back window of the car, face small and scared. A soldier is dodging between the cars, rifle held high. The horizon is smoky.

JOHN (small): Don’t look back.

TEXT: Sometimes I can remember. Sometimes I’m glad I can’t.

PAGE 9

PANEL 1: Back to the present—Murdermouth is holding the dolly close to his lips.

TEXT: It tastes like soap and bubble gum.

PANEL 2: CLOSE-UP of Murdermouth’s cracked lips against the doll’s hair.

TEXT: Like the kid.

PANEL 3: CLOSE-UP. Mouth opens, rough, stained teeth set in diseased gums.

TEXT: Like Dolly.

PANEL 4: MEDIUM CLOSE-UP. The doll is yanked away as the teeth clack together.

SFX (teeth): Klakk

PANEL 5: The Fat Lady is holding the doll. A couple of strands of yarn doll hair dangle from Murdermouth’s mouth.

FAT LADY: Hey, hon, that’s no way to treat a lady.

PANEL 5: Murdermouth grips the bars. The Fat Lady is close enough to grab but he just stands there. The Barker is behind the Fat Lady, but out of reach.

BARKER: Better get back. He’s hungry.

FAT LADY: He’s always hungry.

PANEL 6: The Fat Lady gives the doll to Melody.

FAT LADY: You folks better scram before the clowns come out.

PANEL 7: Soldier #2 blocks their way to the tent entrance, tongue lewdly protruding from his leering face.

SOLDIER #2: Not so fast. I want some of that.

TEXT: Love. We all want love.

PANEL 8: Fat Lady smiles, in triumph, jealousy, perversion.

FAT LADY: I’m all the woman you two boys need.

TEXT: But some want it more than others.

PAGE 10

PANEL 1: Night. There’s only one torch burning inside the tent, near the cage Murdermouth is sitting on the floor, hunched over. He’s “asleep” or what passes for sleep to a zombie.

TEXT: The dark tastes good. My ears don’t hurt now.

PANEL 2: A mouse skitters across the spilled straw of the cage.

PANEL 3: The mouse stops and sniffs at Murdermouth’s toe, which is sticking through the rags wrapped around his feet. The toe is cracked and the skin is split in places.

SFX: Snfff

PANEL 4: As the mouse nibbles at the toe, Murdermouth’s hand descends to it.

PANEL 5: CLOSE-UP of Murdermouth, most of his face is lost in shadow but he’s chewing the mouse. A couple of drops of blood leak out between his lips and the mouse tail dangles.

TEXT: Dark tastes better now. But I smell him.

PANEL 6: A cigarette lights up behind Murdermouth. It is JUGGLES, a carnival performer who has no arms, only stumps. He is sitting on a bale of straw, smoking with the cigarette between two toes. He is skinny, wrinkled but not too old, with sharp, angular features. A few wooden bowling pins are scattered on the ground beside him.

JUGGLES: So, Meat Head, what’s cookin’ tonight?

PANEL 7: Murdermouth slurps down the mouse tail like a spaghetti strand.

SFX: Slurrrp

PANEL 8: Juggles, the cigarette in his mouth, leans back, gripping one of the bowling pins with his toes and tossing it up in the air.

JUGGLES: Don’t talk with your mouth full, huh? Good manners.

PANEL 9: Juggles is a yoga pose, back arched, as he juggles the three pins with his feet,. He blows cigarette smoke toward Murdermouth.

JUGGLES: I like you, Meat Head. We should get an act together. Call it “A Farewell To Arms.”

TEXT: No arms. What a waste.

PANEL 10: Juggles flips to his feet, letting the pins fall. Juggles balances on one leg, wiggling his toes on the other as if waving to a crowd. The torchlight is like a stage spotlight.

JUGGLES: A little comedy, a little tragedy. “You can’t hug with nuclear arms.” “Take a bite outta crime.” That sort of thing.

TEXT: His mouth is noisy. I love him.

PANEL 11: Juggles moves the burning cigarette toward Murdermouth’s outreached hand.

JUGGLES: Yeah, we’re both freaks. Wanna drag?

PAGE 11

PANEL 1: CLOSE-UP. The cigarette tip presses into Murdermouth’s palm, a little smoke rises.

TEXT: I smell good.

PANEL 2: Juggle’s face is grinning as he rubs the cigarette into Murdermouth’s flesh. Behind Juggles, the Fat Lady is entering the tent.

JUGGLES: “Cigarettes are hazardous to your health.” Good one, huh? I tell ya, we could make it big.

PANEL 3: The Fat Lady approaches the cage.

FAT LADY: Leave him alone.

JUGGLES: Finished with the soldier boys, eh? Did you make them stand at attention long?

PANEL 4: MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of Fat Lady.

FAT LADY: You’re just jealous, Juggles. You had your shot and fired a blank.

JUGGLES: Ouch.

PANEL 5: The Fat Lady gently holds Murdermouth’s hand in both of her hands.

JUGGLES: Better watch it. Meat Head looks a little hungry.

PANEL 6: CLOSE-UP of Murdermouth, he looks a little confused, eyes blank.

TEXT: Always hungry. She smells good.

PANEL 7: The Fat Lady kisses the burn wound on Murdermouth’s hand.

FAT LADY: He needs love like everybody else.

JUGGLES: And you should know, because you’ve loved them all.

TEXT: Love. Do I remember that word?

PANEL 8: Murdermouth grabs the Fat Lady’s wrist.

TEXT: Yes. I remember. I hate love.

PAGE 12

PANEL 1: FLASHBACK: Dimly lit bedroom. John Sorenson grabs Julie Sorenson’s wrist, imitating the previous panel.

JOHN: No.

PANEL 2: They are in bed, Julie is in a flimsy nightgown, trying to climb out of the bed, John still holding her wrist. Flickering light from distant fires comes from the window behind them.

JULIE: Let me go.

JOHN: What are you afraid of?

PANEL 3: Julie pulls free and sits up on her knees in bed. John, muscular and bare-chested in his boxer shorts, is also sitting up, tense.

JULIE: Because you’ve become a monster.

(Next few panels are back-and-forth close-ups of John and Julie, as if they are facing off—the effect of light flickering on their faces. Their expressions go from angry to a little confused)

PANEL 4: Close-up of John.

JOHN: I’m only following orders.

PANEL 5: Close-up of Julie.

JULIE: That would be corny if it wasn’t so sad.

PANEL 6: Close-up of John.

JOHN: Somebody has to fight it.

PANEL 7: CLOSE-UP of Julie.

JULIE: You’re a soldier, not a father. And you can’t fight what you can’t see.

PANEL 8: Wide view of bedroom—John grabs Julie again, covers falling to the floor as he yanks her off the bed.

JOHN: This isn’t about us. It’s bigger than that.

JULIE: Nothing’s bigger than us.

PANEL 9: John drags her toward the window, where the fire is reflecting in the glass…

JOHN: Except this…

PAGE 13

HALF SPLASH: The world outside the window—we see Julie and John from behind, standing at the window, and, a few houses in the neighborhood, and beyond, on the horizon, a city is burning, a skyscraper collapsing, a couple of helicopters flying in the air, a searchlight sweeping the night sky. The fire is reflected against a high canopy of clouds and smoke.

TEXT: I can remember a lot now. How I should have let the world end. How I should have held on to what mattered most. How I should have cared about the little things…

DOLORES (Off-panel, in the corner): Mommy?

PANEL 2: John and Julie turn.

JULIE (small): Honey?

PANEL 3: Dolores stands in the doorway in her rumpled pajamas, rubbing one eye, holding her doll against her body.

DOLORES: Something woked me up.

PANEL 4: Julie kneels and hugs Dolores while John stands helplessly behind her.

JULIE: It’s going to be okay, baby.

TEXT: I remember thinking it was never going to be okay again. But I didn’t say anything.

PAGE 14

PANEL 1: BACK TO PRESENT: Murdermouth moves the Fat Lady’s hand to his mouth, a drop of gooey saliva dangling from his cracked and corrupt lips.

TEXT: And now I can’t say anything. Mouth only good for one thing: To love.

PANEL 2: Juggles balances on one foot and tries to grab the Fat Lady with the other foot, to drag her away.

JUGGLES: Told ya he was hungry. Get away.

PANEL 3: Murdermouth’s lips are parted wide, his grungy jagged teeth about to puncture the soft, pale flesh of her wrist. You can see her veins pulsing with blue blood.

TEXT: This isn’t about us.

PANEL 4: Juggles tries to drag the Fat Lady back, and for the first time she is afraid, her eyes wide as she tries to pull away.

FAT LADY: Hey, hon, don’t play rough.

JUGGLES: You and your big fat heart.

PANEL 5: The teeth clamp on her flesh, not ripping, just squeezing firmly.

TEXT: Nothing personal.

PANEL 6: Eye Patch enters the tent, uniform shirt unbuttoned and open, he is sloppy and drunk, carrying the rifle. There’s a patch on his cheek where Murdermouth had scratched him. Juggles is still trying to yank the Fat Lady away.

EYE PATCH: I come for payback.

JUGGLES: Help me before he rips her up.

PANEL 7: The teeth open again and the Fat Lady pulls her hand free.

TEXT: I love her. But now I love him more.

PANEL 8: As Juggles and the Fat Lady fall backwards in a tangle, Eye Patch comes up to the cage with his rifle. He has a ring of keys.

EYE PATCH: I don’t forget.

TEXT: I do. If you forget, you can love as many as you want.

PAGE 15

PANEL 1: Eye patch rams a key into the lock.

EYE PATCH: Fifty bucks and the barker said you’re all mine.

PANEL 2: The Fat Lady is on top of Juggles, whose legs are scissoring and kicking in the air as he tries to get free.

FAT LADY: You leave him alone.

PANEL 3: Eye Patch swings open the cage door.

EYE PATCH: You had your turn. More than one, if I remember right.

PANEL 4: Murdermouth hunched and waiting for Eye Patch to come in.

TEXT: Remember. That word. Tastes like love.

PANEL 5: Eye Patch raises the rifle and points it at Murdermouth. They stare each other down, Eye Patch’s one eye squinting in a cruel expression, Murdermouth’s is blank and confused, mouth hanging open.

EYE PATCH: Fifty bucks. Not quite 30 pieces of silver, but more than your sorry soul is worth.

PANEL 6: The Fat Lady rolls to her knees and crawls toward the cage. Juggles is out of breath, trying to get up.

FAT LADY: He was a soldier like you.

EYE PATCH (off panel): He ain’t like me.

PANEL 7: Close-up of Murdermouth.

TEXT: Like. Love. Tastes the same.

PANEL 8: Eye Patch points the rifle barrel to Murdermouth’s forehead, the Fat Lady waddling fast behind him.

EYE PATCH: Get ready to be dead again.

TEXT: Dead. Alive. Feels the same.

PAGE 16

PANEL 1: The Fat Lady moves in between Eye Patch and Murdermouth and now the rifle points at her.

FAT LADY: Don’t hurt him.

EYE PATCH: Get out of the way.

PANEL 2: Close-up of Fat Lady.

FAT LADY: You’ll have to kill me first.

PANEL 3: Eye Patch, with Juggles coming up from behind. Juggles is bouncing on one foot, holding one of the pins between two toes. Eye Patch’s face is determined, as if he’s about to pull the trigger.

EYE PATCH: You came cheaper than he did.

PANEL 4: Big Action Panel. Eye Patch and Juggles. Juggles swings the bowling pin down on top of Eye Patch’s skull. Eye Patch’s eyes bug out from the contact, mouth open, a bit of spittle flying from crooked teeth.

SFX: KUH-THUBB

PANEL 5: Wide view. Eye Patch falls, scalp bleeding, the rifle dropping to the side. The Fat Lady is in front of Murdermouth.

TEXT BOX: Blood.

PANEL 6: The Fat Lady kneels to check Eye Patch. Show Juggles and Murdermouth from the waist down. Eye Patch is facing the reader, eye closed.

JUGGLES: Get the gun. I ain’t exactly loaded with trigger fingers, ya know.

PANEL 7: Fat Lady feeling the soldier’s neck. She is straining from the effort of bending over.

FAT LADY: Is he dead?

TEXT BOX: Dead. Alive. Tastes the same.

PANEL 8: Murdermouth reaches for the Fat Lady’s shoulder.

JUGGLES: We better get out of here. Ya don’t mess with soldiers and live to tell about it.

TEXT BOX: Soldiers. We were soldiers once.

PAGE 17

PANEL 1: Murdermouth shoves the Fat Lady out of the way.

FAT LADY: Hey!!!

TEXT BOX: Now we are—

PANEL 2: Murdermouth lunges toward Eye Patch, hands outstretched like claws, face erupting in a frenzy, eyes lit in a way we haven’t seen before. He’s hungry, and the smell of blood has made him out of control. Eye Patch fires, the shot goes into Murdermouth’s chest, making a small wet hole.

SFX (rifle) KURR-CHEW

SFX (bullet hitting): PHLUTT

TEXT: Hungry.

PANEL 3: Murdermouth flops onto Eye Patch, mouth open, drool falling from cracked lips as Murdermouth moves in for a bite. Beneath him, Eye Patch’s one eye is half open.

JUGGLES: Christ, is he going to—

PANEL 4: Murdermouth rips into Eye Patch’s neck, tearing away a huge patch of flesh. Eye Patch’s eye is wide open now as the pain hits.

TEXT: Feel my love.

EYE PATCH (scream bleeds over): AiiiiiiieeeeeeEEE

PANEL 5: Big panel, outside of the tent, looking down on the littered carnival grounds. The carnival is sad at night, a few torches flickering, a horse tied to a tree, a barker’s medicine show wagon in the background. The monkey is awake. In the distance, the city is on fire.

EYE PATCH (bleed over): EEEEEEEEEEEEEE

PAGE 18

PANEL 1: FLASHBACK. Close-up. John Sorenson rips into a fried chicken leg, bits of meat and crust flying.

TEXT BOX: We were soldiers once.

PANEL 2: John is in a military lab, in uniform, eating at a stainless steel table, coffee cup by his food. There are rows of medical machines, vials, computers, an autoclave. Across the table is another soldier, CAPT. HAYDEN FRALEY. John is chewing with his mouth open. Behind him is a glass window, we can’t see behind it.

FRALEY: Christ, John, you’d make a great vegetarian.

JOHN: No fun in it. Carrots never scream.

PANEL 3: Over John’s shoulder, we see a human form in the window. We can’t quite make out the face, though it is somehow disturbing.

JOHN: Besides, you work up an appetite when you’re messing with rotters.

PANEL 4: Wider view, now the face is pressed against the glass, it’s a female zombie, deformed, hideous, one eye staring wild. One rotted hand is pressed against the glass, as if the zombie can’t figure out why.

John is still eating, talking with his mouth full, motioning back with his thumb toward the window, but Hayden is leaping up, knocking his chair over.

JOHN: If we can crack this one—

HAYDEN: Christ, John, it’s…it’s…

PANEL 5: Close-up of John, still eating, not seeing the creature.

JOHN: A virus? Bioterrorism? Space dust?

PANEL 6: Wide view, John is reaching for his coffee, Hayden is staggering back toward the door, the zombie now looks hungry.

HAYDEN: It’s working. They did it.

PANEL 7: The female zombie at the window, hammering his hand against the glass. Her mouth is open as if screaming but no sound comes out. John’s face in the foreground in shock as he turns to see the zombie.

SFX (of hand): DUDD

JOHN: You’re dead.

PANEL 8: Close-up. John’s mouth is open in surprise, food falling from it. We see the zombie’s face in each of his pupils.

JOHN (small): We’re all dead…

TEXT: Sometimes I remember. I am a rotter. I am John. Who am I?

PAGE 19

PANEL 1: PRESENT. We see Murdermouth from behind, busy chowing down on Eyepatch. Not too gory, but there’s a little bit of meat flying in the air. Juggles and the Fat Lady look on.

JUGGLES: You sure know how to pick ‘em.

FAT LADY: Love doesn’t have a lick of sense.

PANEL 2: The Barker runs into the cage, hair askew, shirt half unbuttoned as if he was asleep or dunk. His top hat is tilted on his head.

BARKER: Who got shot?

BARKER (second balloon): Oh.

FAT LADY: Better get him out of here.

PANEL 3: The Fat Lady puts her hand on Murdermouth’s shoulder, trying to pull him away. He has Eyepatch’s wrist in his mouth, the fingers dangling, bits of shredded meat hanging down from the end of the arm stump.

FAT LADY: Come on, hon. It ain’t safe here.

BARKER: Leave him alone. That’s my meal ticket.

PANEL 4: Juggles is dragging the rifle away, holding the barrel between his toes.

JUGGLES: If more soldier boys show up, we’re all meat.

PANEL 5: Medium close-up. Murdermouth looking back over his shoulder and up at the Fat Lady, bits of gore and blood streaking his mouth.

TEXT: She loves me.

PANEL 6: Murdermouth holds up a chunk of Eye Patch’s ragged, torn arm, offering it to the Fat Lady. Murdermouth tries to speak.

MURDERMOUTH (no balloon, just near his mouth): Urrrr?

TEXT: Here. Share.

PANEL 7: The Fat Lady pushes the meat away. The Barker is behind her, not quite trusting Murdermouth.

FAT LADY: Eating people is wrong, hon.

BARKER: Depends on who you eat.

PANEL 8: Murdermouth returns to his feasting.

TEXT: You always hurt the ones you love. Because they taste the best.

PAGE 20

PANEL 1: Outside the tent. It is dark. Juggles pokes his head out of the tent, torchlight flickering behind him.

JUGGLES: All clear.

PANEL 2: BARKER starts to close the cage door, with the Fat Lady and Eye Patch still inside. Murdermouth is busy eating.

BARKER: I can’t let my prize escape. You know how hard it is to capture one of these?

FAT LADY: It’s not like bait is hard to find.

PANEL 3: Barker closes the cage door.

BARKER: I’ll be back once I know we’re safe.

FAT LADY: You can’t leave me in here.

PANEL 4: Close-up of the Barker, now we see his eyes are mean.

BARKER: You’re just as much a freak as he is. You just don’t swallow.

PANEL 5: Juggles is sitting behind Barker, one foot balancing the barrel of the rifle, the other foot with a toe perched on the trigger.

JUGGLES: Let ‘em loose, Barnum.

PANEL 6: Barker turns and stares at Juggles, right into the barrel of the rifle. In the background, Fat Lady and Murdermouth stand at the bars of the cage. Murdermouth is dangling one of Eye Patch’s arms.

BARKER: You’re not man enough.

PANEL 7: Juggles face in close-up, the barrel of the rifle in front of it.

JUGGLES: Open it, or Meat Head gets a second helping.

PANEL 8: Barker puts the key in the lock on the cage door, looking back at the tent entrance.

SFX (off-panel): RRRRRRRR

FAT LADY: What’s that?

TEXT: Something outside. I smell smoke…

PAGE 21

PANEL 1: FLASHBACK. John Sorenson in the lab, staggering. The lab is on fire, smoke boiling from the machinery and equipment. The window that held the Rotter is now shattered. Hayden Fraley is sprawled facedown across the table. The scene is chaotic, confused, the door hanging from its hinges.

TEXT: Terrorists. The word had a different meaning back then.

JOHN: Hayden?

PANEL 2: John lifts Hayden’s face from the table. Hayden has a gash across the forehead, but his eyes are open.

HAYDEN (small): The rotter…

PANEL 3: John is trying to drag Hayden to safety, but he doesn’t see the female zombie behind him.

JOHN: Come on before all hell breaks loose.

HAYDEN (smaller): John…

PANEL 4: The zombie, face wreathed in smoke, opens her mouth, reaching for John. The flames are higher now, bits of burning debris are falling from the ceiling. We don’t know whether the zombie is going to get them or if the building is going to collapse first.

PANEL 5: The zombie has John by the shoulder, yanking on him, she’s incredibly strong. John is dropping Hayden.

JOHN: What the fuh—

PANEL 6: The zombie flings John to the side, going for the fallen Hayden, who is trying to get to his knees, blood dripping from his forehead, fire all around.

PANEL 7: John slams into some burning machinery, the smoke thick around him.

SFX: Krunk

PANEL 8: John’s face and one arm in the foreground as he lifts himself from the floor. In the background, wrapped in smoke, the female zombie is biting into the screaming Hayden.

HAYDEN: AYEEEEeeeeee (trailing off into the smoke)

TEXT: Raw or barbecued, it all tastes the same. I didn’t understand it back then.

PAGE 22

PANEL 1: PRESENT. Big splash. The tent opening erupts with fire, a horse plows inside the tent, Juggles falls away in surprise, dropping the gun.

SOLDIER #2 (off-panel): Burn the rotter.

ANOTHER VOICE: Burn it.

TEXT: Terror everywhere.

PANEL 2: The Fat Lady pushes the cage door open. Murdermouth is eating the arm again.

FAT LADY: Come on before all hell breaks loose.

TEXT: The lab. The fire.

PANEL 3: The front of the tent is in flames. The horse rears up on its back legs. Juggles runs for the entrance.

JUGGLES: This way.

PANEL 4: The Fat Lady pulls Murdermouth out of the cage and toward the entrance. The Barker is running and is nearly to the opening.

FAT LADY: Move it, Loverboy.

PANEL 5: A long, flaming pole falls from high in the tent, dragging a large, ragged sheet of burning canvas. It strikes the Barker in the back, making his hat fly off, and knocks him down.

BARKER: UnFF

PANEL 6: Fat Lady is nearly to the entrance, but Murdermouth stops to feed on the Barker. The Barker’s battered top hat is in the foreground.

TEXT: Just like Hayden. Terror never ends, it just changes faces.

PAGE 23

PANEL 1: Juggles stands outside, the first light of day is in the background, the tent now in high flames. Soldier #2 is drinking whiskey, holding a torch.

JUGGLES: Why did you do that?

SOLDIER #2: Why not?

PANEL 2: Inside the tent. The Fat Lady grabs at Murdermouth as he chews on the Barker. The fire has hit the bales of straw and is roaring now. The horse is running toward a gap in the tent.

FAT LADY: Leave him alone.

PANEL 3: Murdermouth looks at Fat Lady, gore dripping down his chin.

TEXT: The more I love, the more I remember.

PANEL 4: Fat Lady’s eyes open wide as she sees something in Murdermouth’s expression, something cold and hungry and bottomless.

TEXT: And I love you.

FAT LADY (small trailing to smaller): Noooo..

PANEL 5: Murdermouth drags the Fat Lady toward him, his mouth open wide and hungry.

TEXT: Do you love me?

PANEL 6: Outside, the tent is collapsing in an inferno. Juggles is smoking a cigarette. The soldier #2 steps aside as the horse runs out of the tent.

SOLDIER #2: One less freak in the world.

JUGGLES: Make that three.

PAGE 24

SPLASH: Murdermouth moves away from the burning carnival, dragging the naked, plump leg of the Fat Lady. He is headed toward the city. There’s a road covered with rusty cars, lamp posts, trash. The city looks dreary and cold in the morning light. The smoke lays around the horizon in a haze.

In smoky clouds of thought balloons, Murdermouth “sees” Dolores and Megan.

TEXT: I remember now. I remember who I really am. And it’s time to go home. To the people I love.

TO BE CONTINUED.

You’ll Never Walk Alone

By Scott Nicholson

Daddy said them that eat human flesh will suffer under Hell.

I ain’t figured that out yet, how there can be a place under Hell. Daddy couldn’t hardly describe it hisself. It’s just a real bad place, hotter than the regular Hell and probably lonelier, too, since Hell’s about full up and nobody’s a stranger. Been so much sinning the Devil had to build a basement for the gray people.

It was Saturday when we heard about them. I was watching cartoons and eating a bowl of corn flakes. I like cereal with lots of sugar, so when the flakes are done you can drink down that thick milk at the bottom of the bowl. It come up like a commercial, some square-headed man in a suit sitting at a desk, with that beeping sound like when they tell you a bad storm’s coming.

Daddy was drinking coffee with his boots off, and he said they wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the wind was lazy as a cut cat. So he figured it was just another thing about the Aye-rabs and who cared if they blew each other to Kingdom Come, except then they showed some of that TV that looks like them cop shows, the camera wiggly so you can’t half see what they’re trying to show you.

Daddy kept the cartoons turned down low because he said the music hurt his ears, but this time he took the remote from beside my cereal bowl and punched it three or four times with his thumb. The square-headed man was talking faster than they usually do, like a flatlander, acting like he deserved a pat on the head because he was doing such a good job telling about something bad. Then the TV showed somebody in rags moving toward the camera and Daddy said, Lordy, looked like something walked out of one of them suicide bombs, because its face was gray and looked like the meat had melted off the bone.

But the square-headed man said the picture was live from Winston-Salem, that’s about two hours from us here in the mountains. The man said it was happening all over, the hospitals was crowded and the governor done called out the National Guard. Then the television switched and it was the President standing at a bunch of microphones, saying something about a new terror threat but how everybody ought to stay calm because you never show fear in the face of the enemy.

Daddy said them damned ragheads must have finally let the bugs out of the bottle. I don’t see how bugs could tear up a man’s skin that way, to where it looked like he’d stuck his head in a lawn mower and then washed his face with battery acid and grease rags. I saw a dead raccoon once, in the ditch when I was walking home from school, and maggots was squirming in its eye holes and them shiny green dookie flies was swarming around its tail. I reckon that’s what kind of bugs Daddy meant, only worse, because these ones get you while you’re still breathing.

I was scared then, but it was the kind where you just sort of feel like the ashes in the pan at the bottom of the woodstove. Where you don’t know what to be afraid of. At least when you hear something moving in the dark woods, your hands get sweaty and your heart jumps a mite faster and you know which way to run. But looking at the TV, all I could think of was the time I woke up and Momma wasn’t making breakfast, and Momma didn’t come home from work, and Momma didn’t make supper. A kind of scared that fills you up belly first, and you can’t figure it out, and you can’t take a stick to it like you can that thing in the dark woods.

And then there was the next day when Momma still didn’t come home, and that’s how I felt about the bugs out of the bottle, because it seems like you can’t do nothing to stop it. Then I felt bad because the President would probably say I was showing fear in the face of the enemy, and Daddy voted for the President because it was high time for a change.

I asked Daddy what we was going to do, and he said the Lord would show the way. Said he was loading the shotgun just in case, because the Lord helped those that helped themselves. Said he didn’t know whether them things could drive a car or not. If they had to walk all the way from the big city, they probably wouldn’t get here for three days. If they come here at all.

Daddy told me to go put up the cows. Said the TV man said they liked living flesh, but you can’t trust what the TV says half the time because they want to sell you something. I didn’t figure how they could sell anything by scaring people like that. But I was awful glad we lived a mile up a dirt road in a little notch in the mountains. It was cold for March, maybe too cold for them bugs. But I wasn’t too happy about fetching the cows, because they tend to wander in the mornings and not come in ‘til dark. Cows like to spend their days all the same. If you do something new, they stomp and stir and start in with the moos, and I was afraid the moos might bring the bugs or them gray people that eat living flesh.

I about told Daddy I was too scared to fetch them by myself, but he might have got mad because of what the President said and all. Besides, he was busy putting on his boots. So I took my hickory stick from by the door and called Shep. He was probably digging for groundhogs up by the creek and couldn’t hear me. I walked out to the fields on the north side, where the grass grows slow and we don’t put cows except early spring. Some of the trees was starting to get new leaves, but the woods was mostly brown rot and granite stone. That made me feel a little better, because a bug-bit gray person would have a harder time sneaking up on me.

We was down to only four cows because of the long drought and we had to cull some steers last year or else buy hay. Four is easy to round up, because all you got to do is get one of them moving and the rest will follow. Cows in a herd almost always point their heads in the same direction, like they all know they’re bound for the same place sooner or later. Most people think cows are dumb but some things they got a lot of sense about. You hardly ever see a cow in a hurry. I figure they don’t worry much, and they probably don’t know about being scared, except when you take them to the barn in the middle of the day. Then maybe they remember the blood on the walls and the steaming guts and the smell of raw meat and the jingle of the slaughter chains.

By the time I got them penned up, Shep had come in from wherever and gave out a bark like he’d been helping the whole time. I took him into the house with me. I don’t ever do that unless it’s come a big snow or when icicles hang from his fur. Daddy was dressed and the shotgun was laying on the kitchen table. I gave Shep the last of my cereal milk. Daddy said the TV said the gray people was walking all over, even in the little towns, but said some of the telephone wires was down so nobody could tell much what was going on where.

I asked Daddy if these was like the End Times of the Bible, like what Preacher Danny Lee Aldridge talked about when the sermon was almost over and the time had come to pass the plate. I always got scared about the End Times, even sitting in the church with all the wood and candles and that soft red cloth on the back of the pews. The End Times was the same as Hell to me. But Preacher Aldridge always wrapped up by saying that the way out of Hell was to walk through the house of the Lord, climb them stairs and let the loving light burn ever little shred of sin out of you. All you had to do was ask, but you had to do it alone. Nobody else could do it for you.

So you got to pray to the Lord. I like to pray in church, where there’s lots of people and the Lord has to mind everybody at the same time. It’s probably wrong, but I get scared when I try to pray all by myself. I used to pray with Momma and Daddy, then just Daddy, and that’s okay because I figured Daddy’s louder than me and probably has more to talk about. I just get that sharp rock feeling in my belly every time I think about the Lord looking at nobody but me, when I ain’t got nothing to hide behind and my stick is out of reach.

But these ain’t the End Times, Daddy said, because the gray people don’t have horns and the TV didn’t say nothing about a dragon coming up out of the sea. But he said since they eat human flesh they’re of the Devil, and said their bodies may be walking around but you better believe their souls are roasting under Hell. Especially if they got bit by the Aye-rab bug. I told him the cattle was put up and he said the chickens would be okay, you can’t catch a chicken even when your legs is working right, much less when you’re wobbling around like somebody beat the tar out of you with an ax handle.

He said to get in the truck. I made Shep jump up in the truck bed, Daddy come out of the house with a loaf of white bread and some cans of sardines. Had the shotgun, too. He got in the truck and started it and I asked him where we was headed. He said in troubled times you go get closer to the Lord.

I asked him if maybe he thought Momma would be okay. He said it didn’t matter none, since the Devil done got her ages ago. Said she was already a gray person before this bug mess even started. Said to waste no prayers on her.

The dirt road was mushy from winter. The road runs by the creek for a while, then crosses a little bridge by the Hodges place. That’s where I always caught the school bus, with Johnny Hodges and his sister Raylene. Smoke was coming out of their chimney and I asked Daddy if we ought to stop and tell them about what the TV said. Daddy said they might be gray people already. I tried to picture Johnny with his face all slopped around, or Raylene with bugs eating her soft places. Mister Hodges didn’t go to church and Johnny told me he used to beat them sometimes when he drank too much. I wondered if all the people who didn’t go to church had turned gray and started eating human flesh.

We passed a few other houses but didn’t see nobody, even at the preacher’s place. The church was right there where the gravel turned to paved, set up above the road on a little green hill. The graveyard was tucked away to one side, where barbed wire strung off a pasture. The church was made of brick, the windows up high so that people wouldn’t look outside during the preaching. Seeing that white cross jabbed up into the sky made me feel not so scared.

We parked the truck around back. Daddy had me carry the food and he carried the shotgun. Said a Bible and a shotgun was all a man needed. I didn’t say nothing about a man needed food. I found a little pack of sugar in the truck’s ashtray and I hid it in my pocket. We didn’t have no Co’-colas.

They keep the church unlocked in case people want to come in and pray. Daddy said people in the big city lock their churches. If they don’t, people might come in and sleep or steal the candle holders and hymn books. But this is the mountains, where people all know each other and get along and you don’t need to lock everything. So we went inside. Daddy made Shep stay out, said it would be disrespecting to the Lord. We locked the door from the inside. I thought somebody else might want to come get close to the Lord in these troubled times, but Daddy said they could knock if they wanted in.

We went up to the front where the pulpit is and Daddy said we might as well get down and give thanks for deliverance. I didn’t feel delivered yet but Daddy was a lot smarter about the Bible, so I went on my knees and kept my eyes closed while Daddy said oh Lord it’s looking mighty dark but the clouds will part and heaven will knock down them gray people and set things right. I joined in on the amen and said I was hungry.

Daddy opened up the sardines and they stank. I spilled some of the fish juice on the floor. We ate some of the bread. It was gummy and stuck to my teeth. I was tired and tried to lay down in the front pew but it was like sleeping in a rock coffin. I didn’t know why people in the big city would want to do such a thing. Daddy started reading from the Bible but the light got bad as the afternoon wore on. The church ain’t got electric power.

I asked Daddy how long we was going to stay holed up and he said as long as it took. I wished we had a TV so we could see what was going on. Night finally come, and I was using the bathroom in back when I heard Shep whimpering. I reckon he was lonely out there. Sounded like he was scratching in the dirt out back of the church.

I climbed up on the sink and looked out the little window. Under the moonlight I saw the graveyard, and it looked like somebody had took a shovel to it, tore up the dirt real bad. Somebody was coming up out of one of the holes, and I reckon that’s what Shep was whimpering about.

I went and told Daddy what I seen and he said maybe it was the End Times after all. Shep started barking and I begged Daddy to let me open the door. He said the Lord would take care of Shep, but then I heard him bark again and I was trying to open the door when Daddy knocked me away. Said he’d take a look, stepped outside with the shotgun, and the gun went off and Daddy started cussing goddamn right there on the church steps. Shep started moaning and I ran to the door and Shep was crawling toward the woods on his belly like his back was broke. I thought Daddy had shot him and I started to cry but then I seen somebody coming from the woods. Daddy racked another shell into the chamber and hollered but the person just kept coming. Daddy told me to go in and lock the door but I couldn’t. I was too scared to be in that big dark church by myself.

Daddy shot high and the pellets scattered through the tops of the trees and still the person kept coming, walking slow with a limp. Another person came out of the trees, then another. They was all headed in the same direction. Straight toward the church.

One of them bent down and got Shep and I never heard such a sound from a dog. Daddy was cussing a blue streak and let loose both barrels and one of the people stood still for just a second, and I could see that gray face turned up toward the moon, the eye holes empty. Then his insides tumbled out but he kept on coming for us and Daddy was pushing me back through the door and we got inside and locked it.

Daddy went up front and I could hear him crying. Except for that, the church was quiet. I thought the gray people might try to knock the door down but maybe they got scared away because of it being a church and all. I went up beside Daddy and waited until he was hisself again. He said he was sorry for showing fear in the face of the enemy and said Oh Lord, give me the strength to do your work. I said Lord, protect Momma wherever she is and Daddy said it was wrong to ask for selfish things.

Daddy said the End Times was a test for the weak. Said you had to stay strong in the Lord. Said it about fifteen hundred times in a row, over and over, in a whisper, and it made me scared.

I was about asleep when Daddy poked me with the gun. Said come here, son, over by the window where I can see you good. The moon was coming through the window and I could hear the gray people walking outside. They was going around in circles, all headed in the same direction.

Daddy asked me if I got bit by one of them bugs. I said don’t reckon. He said, well, you’re looking a little gray, and I told him I didn’t feel nary bit gray. He asked me if I was getting hungry and I said a little. He gave me the rest of the bread and said eat it. I took a bite and he said you didn’t say thanks to the Lord. Then he thanked the Lord for both of us.

I asked Daddy if Shep had gone to heaven. He said it depended on whether he was dead before the gray people ate him. Said Shep might have done turned gray hisself and might bite me if he saw me again. I almost asked Daddy to say a prayer for Shep but that sounded like a selfish thing.

I must have finally dozed off because I didn’t know where I was when I opened my eyes. Daddy was at the front of the church, in the pulpit where Preacher Aldridge stood of a Sunday. The sun was about up and Daddy had the Bible open and was trying to read in the bad light. Somebody was knocking on the church door.

Daddy said the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Daddy stopped just like Preacher Aldridge did, like he wanted to catch his breath and make you scared at the same time. Then Daddy got louder and said we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

I asked what did that mean and Daddy said the Lord come down among people and nobody saw the signs. Said they treated Him just like any normal person, except then He set off doing miracles and people got scared and nailed Him to the cross. Said it was probably gray people that done it. I asked Daddy if we ought to open the church door and see who was knocking.

Daddy said gray people wasn’t fit to set foot in the house of the Lord. I asked what if it’s the preacher or the Hodges kids or Opalee Rominger from down the road. Daddy said they’re all gray, everybody. Said they was all headed under Hell. Said ever sinner is wicked and blind to their sinning ways. I didn’t see how Opalee Rominger could eat living flesh, because she ain’t got no teeth.

The knocking stopped and I didn’t hear no screams so maybe whoever it was didn’t get ate up.

I listened to Daddy read the Bible. The sun come up higher and I wondered about the cows. Did the gray people eat them all? It wasn’t like they ain’t enough sinners to go around. I didn’t for a minute believe that everybody was gray. There had to be others like us. There’s a hymn that says you’ll never walk alone. I don’t reckon the Lord breaks promises like that but I was way too scared to ask. Daddy’s eyes were getting bloodshot, like he hadn’t slept a wink, and he was whispering to hisself again.

I drank water from the plate that Preacher Aldridge passed around on Sundays. The water tasted like old pennies. Daddy didn’t drink nothing. I asked him if he wanted the last can of sardines but he said man can’t live by bread alone but by the word of the Lord. I wondered what the Lord’s words tasted like. I wondered what people tasted like. I ate the sardines by myself.

That night was quiet, like the gray people had done gone on to wherever they were headed. I woke up in the morning plenty sore and I asked Daddy if we could take a peek out the door. Daddy hadn’t moved, stood up there at the pulpit like he was getting ready to let loose with a sermon. He had the shotgun raised toward heaven and I don’t reckon he heard me. I asked it louder and he said you can’t see the gray people because ever sinner is blind. I said I ain’t no sinner but he said you’re looking mighty gray to me.

I said I ain’t gray, and then he made me prove it. Said get on your knees and beg the Lord to forgive you. He pointed the shotgun at me. I didn’t know if he would use it or not, but the way his eye twitched I wasn’t taking no chances. I got on my knees but I was scared to close my eyes. When you close your eyes and pray it’s just you and the Lord. You’re blind but the Lord sees everything. I asked Daddy to pray with me.

Daddy set in to asking the Lord to forgive us our sins and trespasses. I wondered if we was trespassing on the church. It belonged to the Lord, and we was here so we wouldn’t get ate up. I didn’t say nothing to Daddy about it, though. I added an extra loud amen just so Daddy would know for sure that I wasn’t gray.

Later I asked Daddy how come ever sinner is gray. He said the Lord decides such things. He said Momma was a sinner and that’s why she was gray all along and her soul was already under Hell. I didn’t say nothing to that. Sometimes Daddy said I took after my Momma. I wished I’d took after Daddy instead and been able to pray all by myself.

I said it sounded like the gray people was gone. Daddy said you can’t trust the Devil’s tricks. Said the only way out was through the Lord. I said I was getting hungry again. Daddy said get some sleep and pray.

I woke up lost in the dark and Daddy was screaming his head off. He was sitting where the moon come through the window and he said look at me, look at my skin. He held up his hands and said I’m gray, I’m gray, I’m gray. Said he was unfit to be in the House of the Lord. He put the shotgun barrel up to the side of his neck and then there was a flash of light and sounded like the world split in half and then something wet slapped against the walls.

I crawled over to him and laid beside him ‘til all the warm had leaked out. I was scared and I wanted to pray but without Daddy to help me the Lord would look right into me and that was worse than anything. Then I thought if Daddy was in heaven now, maybe I could say a prayer to him instead and he could pass along my words to the Lord.

The sun come up finally and Daddy didn’t look gray at all. He was white. His belly gurgled and the blood around his neck hole turned brown. I went to the door and unlocked it. Since it was Sunday morning, I figured people would be coming to hear the sermon. With more people in the church, I could pray without being so scared.

I stacked up some of the hymn books and stood on them so I could look out the window. They was back. More gray people were walking by, all headed in the same direction. I figured they were going to that place under Hell, just like Daddy said, and it made me happy that Daddy died before he turned gray.

Time passed real slow and the bread was long gone and nobody come to church. I never figured so many people that I used to pray with would end up turning gray. Like church didn’t do them no good at all. I thought of all the prayers I said with them and it made me scared, the kind of scared that fills you up belly first. I wondered what the Lord thought about all them sinners, and what kind of words the Lord said back to them when they prayed.

Daddy’s fingers had gone stiff and I about had to break them to get the shotgun away. He’d used up the last shell. The door was unlocked but nobody set foot in the church. I was hoping whoever had knocked the other day might come back, but they didn’t.

The gray people didn’t come in the church. I figured if they was eating live flesh they would get me sooner or later. Except maybe they was afraid about the church and all, or being in plain sight of the Lord. Or maybe they ain’t figured out doors yet. I wondered if you go through doors to get under Hell.

Night come again. Daddy was dead cold. I was real hungry and I asked Daddy to tell the Lord about it, but I reckon Daddy would call that a selfish thing and wouldn’t pass it on. I kept trying to pray but I was scared. Preacher Aldridge said you got to do it alone, can’t nobody do it for you.

Maybe one of them Aye-rab bugs got in while the door was open. Maybe the gray people ain’t ate me yet because I ain’t live flesh no more. Only the Lord knows. All I know is I can’t stay in this church another minute. Daddy’s starting to stink and the Lord’s looking right at me.

Like I’m already gray.

I don’t feel like I am, but Daddy said ever sinner is blind. And it’s the kind of hungry that hurts.

Outside the church, the morning is fresh and cold and smells like broken flowers. I hear footsteps in the wet grass. I turn and walk, and I fit right in like they was saving a place for me. I’m one of them, following the ones ahead and leading the ones behind. We’re all headed in the same direction. Maybe this entire world is the place under Hell, and we’ve been here all along.

I ain’t scared no more, just hungry. The hungry runs deep. You can’t live by bread alone. Sometimes you need meat instead of words.

I don’t have to pray no more, out here where it ain’t never dark. Where the Lord don’t look at you. Where we’re all sinners. Where you’re born gray, again and again, and the End Times never end.

Where you never walk alone.

About the author:

I have written 12 novels, including The Red Church, Speed Dating with the Dead, Disintegration, and The Skull Ring. Other electronic works include Burial to Follow and the story collections Ashes, The First, Murdermouth, Gateway Drug, and Flowers. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where I write for a newspaper, play guitar, raise an organic garden, and work as a freelance fiction editor.

Come to the Haunted Computer, become a Spooky Microchip, and help me build my next book. You’ll also find writing tips, free fiction, and survival tips.

Talk to me <a href="mailto:hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com.">via email</a>, <a href="www.twitter.com/hauntedcomputer">Haunted Computer on Twitter</a>, or <a href="http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com">Scott’s blog</a>. If you enjoyed this book, please tell your friends and give another Nicholson title a try. If you hated it, why not try another one anyway? What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, and what does kill you is probably lurking in my next book. Read on for more.

You should read these other thrillers because you deserve a strange, daring adventure:

THE RED CHURCH

Book I in the Sheriff Littlefield Series

By Scott Nicholson

Stoker Award finalist and alternate selection of the Mystery Guild

For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won't stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield hates the red church for a different reason. His little brother died in a freak accident at the church twenty years ago, and now Frank is starting to see his brother's ghost. And the ghost keeps demanding, "Free me." People are dying in Whispering Pines, and the murders coincide with McFall's return.

The Days, the Littlefields, and the McFalls are descendants of the original families that settled the rural Appalachian community. Those old families share a secret of betrayal and guilt, and McFall wants his congregation to prove its faith. Because he believes he is the Second Son of God, and that the cleansing of sin must be done in blood.

"Sacrifice is the currency of God," McFall preaches, and unless Frank and Ronnie stop him, everybody pays.

Learn more about The Red Church and the real Appalachian church that inspired the novel: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/redchurch.htm">The Red Church</a>

DRUMMER BOY

Book II in the Sheriff Littlefield Series

By Scott Nicholson

On an Appalachian Mountain ridge, three boys hear the rattling of a snare drum deep inside a cave known as “The Jangling Hole,” and the wind carries a whispered name.

An old man who grew up at the foot of the mountain believes something inside the Hole has been disturbed by a developer’s bulldozers. Sheriff Frank Littlefield, haunted by his own past failures, must stand against a public enemy that has no fear of bullets, bars, or mortal justice. A local reporter believes the supernatural mysteries are more than just mountain folk tales.

On the eve of a Civil War reenactment, the town of Titusville prepares to host a staged battle. The weekend warriors aren’t aware they will soon be fighting an elusive army. A troop of Civil War deserters, trapped in the Hole by a long-ago avalanche, is rising from a long slumber, and the war is far from over.

And one misfit kid is all that stands between the town and the cold mouth of hell…

Learn more about Drummer Boy and the Appalachian legend that inspired the novel: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/drummerboy.htm">Drummer Boy</a>

THE SKULL RING

By Scott Nicholson

Julia Stone will remember, even if it kills her.

With the help of a therapist, Julia is piecing together childhood memories of the night her father vanished. When Julia finds a silver ring that bears the name "Judas Stone," the past comes creeping back. Someone is leaving strange messages inside her house, even though the door is locked. The local handyman offers help, but he has his own shadowy past. And the cop who investigated her father's disappearance has followed her to the small mountain town of Elkwood.

Now Julia has a head full of memories, but she doesn't know which are real. Julia's therapist is playing games. The handyman is trying to save her, in more ways than one. And a sinister cult is closing in, claiming ownership of Julia's body and soul . . . .

Learn more about The Skull Ring and False Recovered Memory Syndrome: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/skullring.htm">The Skull Ring</a>

SPEED DATING WITH THE DEAD

By Scott Nicholson

A paranormal conference at the most haunted hotel in the Southern Appalachian mountains . . . a man’s promise to his late wife that he’d summon her spirit . . . a daughter whose imagination goes to dark places . . . and demonic evil lurking in the remote hotel’s basement, just waiting to be awoken.

When Digger Wilson brings his paranormal team to the White Horse Inn, he is skeptical that his dead wife will keep her half of the bargain. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. But when one of the conference guests channels a mysterious presence and an Ouija board spells out a pet phrase known only to Digger and his wife, his convictions are challenged. And when people start to disappear, Digger and his daughter Kendra must face the circle of demons that view the hotel as their personal playground. Because soon the inn will be closing for good, angels, can’t be trusted, and demons don’t like to play alone . . .

Learn more about Speed Dating with the Dead and the 2008 paranormal conference and inn that inspired the novel: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/speeddating.htm">Speed Dating with the Dead</a>

BURIAL TO FOLLOW

By Scott Nicholson

When Jacob Ridgehorn dies, it's up to Roby Snow to make sure his soul goes on to the eternal reward. The only way Roby can do that is convince the Ridgehorn family to eat a special pie, but a mysterious figure named Johnny Divine is guarding the crossroads. When peculiar Appalachian Mountain funeral customs get stirred into the mix, Roby has to perform miracles . . . or else.

Novella originally published in the Cemetery Dance anthology "Brimstone Turnpike.”

Learn more about Burial to Follow at the Haunted Computer: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/burialtofollow.htm">Burial To Follow</a>

FLOWERS

By Scott Nicholson

Features the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award grand-prize winner "The Vampire Shortstop" and other tales of fantasy for young adult readers, such as “When You Wear These Shoes” and “In The Heart of November.” Includes a bonus essay and afterword, as well as a bonus story from the author’s teen-age files.

Learn more about the young-adult collection Flowers and the award-winning “The Vampire Shortstop”: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/flowers.htm">Flowers</a>

ASHES

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of supernatural and stories by award-winning author Scott Nicholson, including "Homecoming," "The Night is an Ally" and "Last Writes." From the author of THE RED CHURCH, THE SKULL RING, and the story collections FLOWERS and THE FIRST, these stories visit haunted islands, disturbed families, and a lighthouse occupied by Edgar Allan Poe. Exclusive introduction by Jonathan Maberry, author of THE DRAGON FACTORY and GHOST ROAD BLUES, as well as an afterword.

Learn more about the supernatural stories in Ashes: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/ashes.htm">Ashes</a>

THE FIRST

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of dark fantasy and futuristic stories from award-winning author Scott Nicholson. Dystopia, cyberpunk, and science fiction flavor these stories that visit undiscovered countries and distant times. Includes two bonus essays and Nicholson's first-ever published story, in addition to the four-story Aeropagan cycle.

Learn more about the fantasy and science fiction stories in The First: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/the first.htm">The First</a>

MURDERMOUTH: ZOMBIE BITS

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of zombie stories, from the zombie point-of-view to the shoot-‘em-up survival brand of apocalyptic horror. Proof that even zombies have a heart . . .Based on the comic book currently in development by Scott Nicholson and Derlis Santacruz. With a bonus story by Jack Kilborn, a comic script, and Jonathan Maberry’s “Zombie Apocalypse Survival Scorecard.”

Learn more about Murdermouth: Zombie Bits and see zombie art: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/murdermouth.htm">Murdermouth: Zombie Bits</a>

GATEWAY DRUG

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of crime and mystery tales from the vaults of Scott Nicholson. Includes “How to Nail Your Own Coffin” and Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror selection “Dog Person,” as well as the psychological thrillers “Beggar’s Velvet,” “Sewing Circle,” and more stories that appeared in magazines such as Crimewave, Cemetery Dance, and Blue Murder.

Learn more about Gateway Drug: Mystery Stories: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/gatewaydrug.htm">Gateway Drug</a>

AS I DIE LYING

By Scott Nicholson

Richard Coldiron’s first and last novel follows his metafictional journey through a troubled childhood, where he meets his invisible friend, his other invisible friend...and then some who aren’t so friendly.

There’s Mister Milktoast, the protective punster; Little Hitler, who leers from the shadows; Loverboy, the lusty bastard; and Bookworm, who is thoughtful, introspective, and determined to solve the riddle of Richard’s disintegration into either madness or genius, and of course only makes things worse. They reside in the various rooms of his skull, a place known as the Bone House, and take turns rearranging the furniture. As Richard works on his autobiography, his minor characters struggle with their various redemptive arcs.

Richard keeps his cool despite the voices in his head, but he’s about to get a new tenant: the Insider, a malevolent soul-hopping spirit that may or may not be born from Richard’s nightmares and demands a co-writing credit and a little bit of foot-kissing dark worship.

Now Richard doesn’t know which voice to trust. The book’s been rejected 117 times. The people he loves keep turning up dead. And here comes the woman of his dreams.

Learn more about As I Die Lying and the six people in Richard Coldiron’s head: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/dielying.htm">As I Die Lying</a>

DISINTEGRATION

By Scott Nicholson

Careful what you wish for.

When a mysterious fire destroys his home and kills his young daughter, Jacob Wells is pulled into a downward spiral that draws him ever closer to the past he thought was dead and buried.

Now his twin brother Joshua is back in town, seeking to settle old scores and claim his half of the Wells birthright. Jacob’s wife Renee is struggling with her own guilt, because the couple had lost an infant daughter several years before.

As Jacob and Joshua return to the twisted roles they adopted at the hands of cruel, demanding parents, they wage a war of pride, wealth, and passion. They share the poisonous love of a woman who would gladly ruin them both: Carlita, a provocative and manipulative Hispanic whose immigrant family helped build the Wells fortune.

Joshua wants other things, too, but Jacob’s desires are divided between the forbidden love he can’t possess, the respectability he can never have, and the revenge he is dying to taste. And Renee has dark motives of her own.

If only Jacob can figure out which one to blame. But the lines of identity are blurred, because Joshua and Jacob share much more than blood.

And the childhood games have become deadly serious.

Learn more about the psychological thriller Disintegration: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/disintegration.htm">Disintegration</a>

FOREVER NEVER ENDS

By Scott Nicholson

It falls from the heavens and crashes to earth in the remote southern Appalachian Mountains.

The alien roots creep into the forest, drawn by the intoxicating cellular activity of the humus and loam. The creature feeds on the surrounding organisms, exploring, assimilating, and altering the life forms it encounters. Plants wilt from the contact, trees wither, animals become deformed monstrosities, and people become something both more and less than human.

A telepathic psychology professor, a moonshine-swilling dirt farmer, a wealthy developer, and a bitter recluse team up to take on the otherwordly force that is infecting their town. The author’s preferred edition of the 2003 paperback release The Harvest.

Learn more about the science fiction thriller Forever Never Ends: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/forever.htm">Forever Never Ends</a>

TROUBLED

By Scott Nicholson

When twelve-year-old Freeman Mills arrives at Wendover, a group home for troubled children, it’s a chance for a fresh start. But second chances aren’t easy for Freeman, the victim of painful childhood experiments that gave him the ability to read other people’s minds.

Little does Freeman know that his transfer was made at the request of Dr. Richard Kracowski, whose research into the brain’s electrical properties is revealing new powers of the human mind. Kracowski is working for a secret society called the Trust, but also has his own agenda in exploring the nature of the soul. His experiments have an unexpected side effect, though. The electromagnetic fields used in his experiments are summoning the ghosts of the patients who died at Wendover back when it was a psychiatric ward.

Freeman simply wants to survive, take his medicine for manic depression, and deceive his counselors into believing he is happy. When he meets the anorexic Vicky, who may also be telepathic, he’s afraid some of his darkest secrets will be uncovered. But when the other children develop their own clairvoyant abilities, and insane spirits begin haunting the halls of Wendover, he can’t safely hide inside his own head anymore.

Meanwhile, the Trust is installing sophisticated equipment in the home’s basement, aggressively probing the threshold between life and death. And they’ve brought in another scientist who doesn’t share Dr. Kracowski’s reluctance to push the limits.

This scientist is a pioneer in ESP induction, and he performed most of his work on a very special subject: his son, Freeman Mills. The author’s preferred edition of the 2005 U.S. paperback release The Home, in development as a feature film.

Learn more about the paranormal thriller Forever Never Ends: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/troubled.htm"> Troubled</a>

CREATIVE SPIRIT

By Scott Nicholson

After parapsychologist Anna Galloway is diagnosed with metastatic cancer, she has a recurring dream in which she sees her own ghost. The setting of her dream is the historic Korban Manor, which is now an artist’s retreat in the remote Appalachian Mountains. Drawn both by the ghost stories surrounding the manor and her own sense of destiny, Anna signs up for the retreat.

Sculptor Mason Jackson has come to Korban Manor to make a final, all-or-nothing attempt at success before giving up his dreams. When he becomes obsessed with carving Ephram Korban’s form out of wood, he questions his motivation but is swept up in a creative frenzy unlike any he has ever known.

Sylva Hartley is an old mountain witchwoman who is connected to Ephram Korban both before and after his death. Her knowledge of Appalachian folk spells and potions has bound her to the manor in a deeper and darker way. Sylva harbors a family secret that refuses to stay slumbering in its grave.

The manor itself has secrets, with fires that blaze constantly in the hearths, portraits of Korban in every room, and deceptive mirrors on the walls. The house’s brooding atmosphere affects the creative visions of the visiting artists. A mysterious woman in white calls to Anna from the forest, while Mason is driven by the whispers of an unseen critic. With an October blue moon looming, both the living and the dead learn the true power of their dreams.

It’s a power that Korban craves for himself, because he walks a shadowy land where passions burn cold and even the ghosts are haunted. The author’s preferred edition of the 2004 U.S. paperback release The Manor.

Learn more about the paranormal thriller Creative Spirit: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/troubled.htm"> Creative Spirit</a>

SOLOM

By Scott Nicholson

Katy Logan wasn’t quite sure why she left her finance career in the big city to marry religion professor Gordon Smith and move to the tiny Appalachian community of Solom.

Maybe she just wanted to get her 12-year-old daughter Jett away from the drugs and bad influences. Maybe she wanted to escape from the memories of her first husband. Or perhaps she was enchanted by the promise of an idyllic life on the farm that has been in Gordon’s family for 150 years.

But the move has been anything but stress-free, because the man she married seems more interested in the region’s rural Baptist sects than in his new wife. The Smith family secrets run deep: Gordon teases Katy and Jett with a story about a wicked scarecrow that comes in from the fields at night to slake an unnatural thirst. Gordon’s great-grandfather was a horseback preacher who mysteriously disappeared while on a mission one wintry night, and some say a rival preacher did him in.

Gordon’s first wife Rebecca died under equally mysterious circumstances, and Katy’s starting to believe Rebecca’s spirit is still in the house. The scent of lilacs drifts across the kitchen, doors slam shut with no one else home, and the kitchen curtains flutter even when the windows are closed. Katy becomes obsessed with Rebecca’s recipes and clothes, and she finds herself driven to find out more about Rebecca to emulate her and therefore please Gordon. To make matters worse, Gordon’s herd of goats watches Katy every time she leaves the house, fixing their rectangular pupils on her as if waiting for some silent command.

Jett is worried about Mom, but she has worries of her own. A Goth girl in a rural elementary school, she gets teased for being different. She misses her dad, and feels guilty because her drug abuse forced Mom to enter a hasty marriage with Gordon. The pressure leads her back to drugs despite her promise to Mom. Now she fears the drugs are blowing her mind. She’s starting to hallucinate, and the goats, scarecrows, and a strange man in a black hat are all part of her madness.

But the residents of Solom know all about the man in the black hat. They whisper the legends around the pot-bellied stove at the general store, they pray for protection from him in their little white churches, they think about him as they gather hay, harvest corn, and work their gardens. The brave ones talk about him, believing him dead and buried, but nobody dares to utter his name.

The Reverend Harmon Smith has come back more than century after his last missionary trip, and he has unfinished business. But first Katy and Jett must be brought into the family, and the farm must be prepared to welcome him home. Gordon has been denying his heritage, but now it’s time to choose sides. Does he protect the ones he loves, or surrender to the ancestral urge for revenge?

Learn more about the paranormal thriller Solom: <a href="http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/solom.htm"> Solom</a>

Contact me at hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com because I’d love to know what you think—even if you want to cut my fingers off and feed them to a demon. Let me know about any misspellings and formatting issues, since books in the digital age are living documents.

This is a work of fiction. All people, incidents, and places are solely the products of the author’s imagination. The writer begins the journey, but you complete it. . . .

Scott

hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com

http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com

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Table of Contents

Murdermouth: Zombie Bits