Back From The Dead

“You have any way to keep tabs on her?”

“Not really. I can drive by her house.”

“What about Scott or Dave? Do they know Chelsea’s friends? Even casually?”

“I don’t think so. I can check.”

“Do that. Tell them what I just told you. We need to watch what happens with her and keep our ears open to the rumor mill.”

“Well shit, that means we just gotta hang out with my neighbor, Joyce. You know, the crazy cat lady that lives next door to me?”

Gordon grinned. Joyce was a middle-aged woman that lived by herself in a large ranch house next to Steve’s. She’d been single as long as Gordon knew her, and had adult children who often dumped their spawn at her place on the weekends. Joyce was a nice enough lady, but could talk the ears off a donkey and sometimes talked to herself when she was tending to the garden in the back yard. She also had a lot of cats, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven. Or maybe it was ten. It was hard to keep count. Despite those annoying qualities, Joyce had the uncanny ability to know what was going on in town before it made the local weekly newspaper. She was like the little old lady in movies who spied on her neighbors with a telescope and then got on the phone to gossip with her friends about who was sleeping with whom, who’d lost their job at the paper mill, who’d been arrested for DUI the previous evening, what family tragedy had befallen the Green family who lived on the other side of town. Only instead of gossiping about it on the phone with her friends, Joyce kept the information bottled inside her because she had no friends.

She was always eager to share the information if you so much as paid the slightest bit of attention to her, though.

“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Gordon said. “Joyce seems to know everybody in town.”

“That’s the plan, then.” Steve seemed agreeable. He also sounded more awake now.

“I still think we should do something to get rid of the zombies permanently,” Gordon said. “At least bring the idea up to Scott. If he feels the threat of discovery, he’ll agree.”

“You would think,” Steve said. He sounded more sympathetic to Gordon’s point of view now. “I can bring it up to him. Besides, we can always make more zombies, right?”

“Of course,” Gordon answered. Not if I can help it, he thought.

A police siren sounded in the distance, fading away in the early morning. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Talk to you later.”

“Later.” Gordon hung up the phone. Another siren rose in the distance, joining the first one as it headed to some unknown disaster. For a minute Gordon wondered what would happen if the zombies locked in Scott’s guesthouse broke out. What kind of havoc would they cause? How would the police respond? He felt a brief flare of panic at the thought those police sirens were heading to Scott’s place, but then he realized they were heading elsewhere, out toward the northeast part of town. Zuck’s Woods lay toward the northeast side of town.

Gordon frowned at the thought.

It bothered him and it was hard for him to fall asleep.

Chapter Twenty

Not far away from where Gordon Smith had performed his impromptu spell, something stirred beneath the ground.

The dark forces that had been summoned had been growing steadily stronger all night. They’d harnessed the energy that had been bestowed on them, drawing more from the tear in the veil that had been opened. Seeking living organisms, the dark force had possessed all the available life forms in the surrounding area and duplicated itself by infecting more.

And it was working.

From the dead mole, to the squirrel, to the possum, it had moved up along the chain until it duplicated itself on to a human being. The human had been lounging at the very edge of Zuck’s Woods, looking up at the night sky when the force had driven the possum to transfer itself. The force no longer needed the dead to occupy. It was now strong enough to transfer itself on to living beings. First, though, the living being had to be killed.

An insatiable need to duplicate itself as rapidly as possible was what had driven the force to take down the human. Relying on the remnants of the possum’s instincts had driven it through the forest where it infected other animals. Once it infected the human, it had then ventured into the house, zeroing in on the warm body of a smaller human it sensed cowering behind a closed door. It didn’t take much for the now infected human to make a transfer on to one of its own.

And once the humans in the house were infected, they ventured out into the night. The possum, still powered by the force, did the same.

And the force continued to replicate itself. One life form at a time.

It also learned.

Once in possession of the humans, it realized it had to hold back a little. Retreat into the shadows of the woods, observe the other humans who remained in their homes. The element of surprise had to be used.

And with daylight, it came.

* * *

Jennifer Egan was already in her tights and tank-top and beginning the morning run on her treadmill when a shadow fell across the sliding door of her house.

She looked up and saw that it was Mike Lombardo, the kid from up the street.

Jennifer pressed the slow-down button on the treadmill. “Mike?”

Mike Lombardo slapped his hand on the glass sliding door. It wasn’t until Jennifer approached the door to see what was going on — she couldn’t really get a good look at him due to the lights in the exercise room — that she noticed he was injured badly. His chest was covered with blood, his left cheek bearing a horrible gash. “Oh God, Mike, get in here quick, I’ll call 911!” She opened the door and reached out to pull Mike inside, but he grabbed her. Jennifer barely had a chance to scream as he launched himself at her, ripping her throat out with two savage bites that brought her down in a rain of blood.

Two doors down, John Lombardo entered the back door of the Cyrus family home and managed to get halfway up the stairs before being confronted by Henry Cyrus. Henry stood at the top of the stairs, bearing a black handgun. Henry pointed the gun at John. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

John ignored the warning. Henry fired three shots, striking him in the shoulder and chest. John kept coming and was on Henry quickly in a flash of gunfire and blood.

The gunfire woke up Henry’s common-law wife, Maggie, and her two kids. The transfer was handled so quickly, though, that Henry was able to quickly subdue Maggie and make the transfer to her by his ownself. John took care of the two kids.

The gunshots woke up Nancy Armstrong, who lived in the home behind the Cyrus family. Nancy sat up in bed, the residue of her lover’s touch still on her skin and inside her. Her lover, Carl Boyd, had left the house a few hours ago and she’d been dozing, reliving their lovemaking in her dreams when the gunshots shattered them. Nancy sat up in bed, startled as three more gunshots rang out in quick succession, then reached for the phone on her nightstand. She picked it up, called 911, waited.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“My name is Nancy Armstrong and I live at 3587 Oak Street in Spring Valley. I just heard gunshots coming from the house behind me.”

“How many gunshots did you hear Ms. Armstrong?”

“Six.”

“Are you sure they were gunshots?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” Nancy knew the sound of a gunshot. She’d accompanied her husband to firing ranges enough times to distinguish between a gunshot and a firecracker. Her husband, Paul, was out of town on business. He was out of town on business a lot. Every week, in fact. The thought that Paul suspected she’d taken on a lover was in