Back From The Dead

him to his knees. Tim was barely aware that he was crying now.

“You want to be a vampire so much, we got you something to drink.” Scott’s voice was teasing, mocking. “After all, blood is blood, right? Figure we might need to get you used to animal blood before you start going after people.”

And as Tim realized the mad intent behind Scott’s words, he fought one last time to break free from the grip. The blows crashed down on him again, landing on his torso, his legs. He was driven closer to the ground, Scott forcing his face into the matted, bloodied fur of the dead possum. He screamed, his throat becoming raw, and as he screamed his face was shoved into the animal’s body and he felt the fur, felt the matted blood, barely heard Scott’s voice commanding him to drink! Drink its fucking blood, you freak! He didn’t hear Dave and Steve laughing uncontrollably, wasn’t aware that he was crying, that he’d peed his pants and his strength left him as Scott held his face to the possum’s body, filling his mouth and nostrils, the strong scent of it now overwhelming, triggering his nausea, and that’s when he threw up.

Throwing up had been the trigger. Scott released him and the boys had jumped back, laughing. “Ha ha ha, lookit him!”

“Fuckin’ puked all over himself!”

They’d stood over Tim, laughing, watching him puke his guts out. Then they’d walked away, leaving him lying there on the ground, dry heaving, out of breath from crying, still sick with nausea, pain wracking his body.

That simple, very quick reliving of the incident that had set things in motion for Tim Gaines — the arrest of Scott and his friends, their parents influence on the town which forced the authorities to release them and not press charges, Scott and his friends circulating nasty rumors about Tim in the years to follow — was enough to convince Tim that, yes, Scott Bradfield and his crew could be capable of such cruelty. It was a no- brainer. If he could beat another kid, force him to try to eat a dead animal, he was capable of even worse atrocities.

So he listened as Gordon continued his story. He listened as Gordon told him about their brief excursions into Harrisburg and Philadelphia, where they’d target a homeless person and beat him up, then leave. It sickened Tim to hear this and it once again angered him that a group of kids who cloaked themselves with such holier-than-thou bullshit — who had everybody in town fooled that they were not only such upstanding, caring citizens and perfect Christians — were such monsters.

When Gordon got to the part of the abduction of Neal Ashford, Tim drew in a breath. This crossing the line from random beatings to felony abduction was the final straw. Tim could only listen with bated breath as Gordon told them how they’d abducted Neal and taken him back to Scott’s place and locked him in the guest house. He related how the plan had been to use Neal as their own personal punching bag, that the whole idea was to use somebody nobody would care about, but then the guy had fucking died on them a week later, and that’s when Gordon had come up with the idea of resurrecting him.

Tim blinked. “You what?”

“I came up with the idea of bringing him back from the dead,” Gordon said. Despite the therapeutic nature of the confession, Gordon looked amazingly calm. “I thought…if he came back…it would be better. Because then we wouldn’t have to worry about getting another one. We could just use this same guy over and over again. Just beat on him without having to worry about killing him.”

Tim didn’t see the logic in that. They’d already killed the guy. But then, they never saw Neal as a fellow human being. They saw him as an object to pummel and pound on, to use as a human punching bag. With that thought it was now clear to Tim. He was speaking to a stone-cold sociopath.

Somehow he kept his fear in check as he nodded at Gordon to continue.

As Gordon segued into his borrowing of Back From the Dead from Tim, everything became clear. He finished this part of the story himself aloud. “When I told you what the book was about, you realized it contained the elements you were thinking about,” he said. “That’s why you were asking me about the zombies, how they were made.”

“Exactly,” Gordon said, nodding. He took another sip of coke. “And that’s why I asked you to show me the parts in the book that told how to make the zombies.”

“But…I don’t understand…that book is just a horror novel. It’s not real. It was just a story!”

“You said yourself that zombies are real in Haiti!” Gordon argued.

“Yeah, but what takes place in Back From the Dead is fiction. It isn’t real! It’s made up.”

Gordon shook his head. It looked like he was struggling with this basic fact. Tim tried to remember if Gordon came from an overtly religious family, the kind that believed the fantasy novels of J.K. Rowling were as real as thunderstorms. “It might be a story, but it mixes fiction with reality. All fiction does that to a certain extent, right?”

“I suppose,” Tim said. “But…” But you can’t resurrect the dead! That’s impossible!”

And then in the back of his mind came one of the oldest stories of the dead being resurrected. That son of a Jewish carpenter who’d been nailed to a tree, was entombed in a cave, then rose from the dead three days later.

He banished that particular thought from his mind, focusing on what Gordon was telling him. He nodded for Gordon to continue.

Gordon wrapped it up quickly, telling him about the second abduction, how that homeless guy was killed quickly in a fit of rage by Scott, how they’d taken the body out to Zuck’s Woods that night and waited while the spell did its work. He felt a sense of disgust as Gordon revealed that the other guys wanted Neal Ashford’s corpse to eat the second homeless man, and he was even more horrified when Gordon told him about John Elfman. His jaw dropped. “You killed John?”

“I didn’t kill John!” Gordon protested. He was showing a faint sign of nervousness. “Scott…Dave and Steve…they killed him.”

Tim almost blurted, but you helped! but didn’t. For the first time, the thought that Gordon was making everything up as some sort of elaborate practical joke occurred to him, but he kept that to himself. “Okay, Scott and others did it. But…why?”

“They wanted to feed somebody to the zombies,” Gordon explained. His features had a sense of pleading in them, as if he were begging Tim to understand the nature of their actions. “It was like…once we started talking about doing this, all the talk of zombies and stuff…and when it really happened with Neal…they wanted to see if all the stuff you see in movies was real.”

“And was it?”

Gordon nodded. It seemed that with Gordon safe within the sanctuary of his living room he felt comfortable in letting his true emotions through. He looked visibly affected by what he’d seen. “Yeah,” Gordon said. “Once John was pushed into the zombies it was like…they turned on him. It was just like those Dawn of the Dead movies. They just…tore into him.”

“They ate him?”

Gordon nodded. “Yeah.” Gordon’s eyes were haunted. They reflected the depths of the horror he’d witnessed.

As horrible as it all sounded, Tim still had a hard time trying to wrap his mind around it. They’d resurrected their murder victims and turned them into zombies…not just Haitian zombies, but a combination of Haitian and Romero zombies, the latter of which weren’t even real! How was this possible?

Gordon wrapped the story to its conclusion. “I helped the guys clean up. It was…pretty messy. Steve got sick…I did too. We finally got the worst of it out of there and — ”

“How’d you get John’s body out without getting attacked by the zombies?”

“Scott brought a bunch of gardening tools. Rakes, shovels and shit like that. We used them to fish the…body parts…over to us.”

“And the zombies didn’t try to lunge at you?”

“Not really. They were pretty sedated at that point. Like munching on John had made them lazy. You know?”

Tim didn’t know, not having ever seen a zombie consume a human being before. “So you got the rest of John