Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

least the places that I could reach.

Perhaps, following my execution, the grisly accounts of my life’s work will be made public. Perhaps some unscrupulous individual will bribe a morgue attendant into letting them take photos of my body and they will end up in a sleazy tabloid or on some off-beat website. Then all the world will be privy to my pursuit of barbarity and perversion.

So, if you are browsing the internet during the late hours of the night, and come upon me … please, indulge your morbid curiosity.

Come … read my diary.

Abed ELIZABETH MASSIE

“Abed” first appeared in Still Dead, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector and published by Bantam Books in 1992.

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Elizabeth Massie is a Scribe Award-winning and two time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of horror novels, short fiction, media tie ins, historical novels, contemporary mainstream fiction, and units and features in American history textbooks, among other things. Her first love is horror, and since 1984 she has had over 100 horror shorts in numerous magazines and anthologies as well as 5 horror collections and 7 horror novels published by Berkley, Simon & Schuster, Carroll & Graf, Leisure, and others. Recently, some of her works have begun appearing in e-book form through Crossroad Press and Necon E-Books. These include her Stoker-winning Sineater, her collections The Fear Report and new collection Afraid, and a new mainstream novel, Homegrown. Currently she is hard at work on a new zombie novel (as of yet untitled) set in the wild mountains of western Virginia. Beth lives in the Shenandoah Valley with the talented illustrator Cortney Skinner. She loves hiking, camping, chai, and World’s Softest Socks. She thinks cheese is the food of nightmares. I mean, come on. It’s old, rotted, coagulated milk. What’s not to fear? Her website is: www.elizabethmassie.com.

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“Abed” has had a rather controversial life. Following the initial publication in Still Dead, it was rejected for a later zombie anthology (as a reprint) because the publisher (not the editor) thought it was too graphic. Twice, independent movie makers had to shelve it because others who were to be involved with the production got cold feet and said they just couldn’t go that far. Now, however, it looks like it may be made into a short film … fingers crossed. (My preference is that most of what goes on in the story will happen “off stage”; you’ll know what I mean once you’ve read it.) Personally, I see it as a sad story of isolation, despair, and resignation … but it’s all wrapped up in a pretty graphic package.:) In a recent interview, John Skipp said, “Elizabeth Massie’s ‘Abed’ is probably still the hardest-punching zombie short story I’ve ever read.”

Meggie’s a-line dress is yellow, bright like a new dandelion in the side yard and as soft as the throats of the tiny toads Meggie used to find in the woods that surround the farm. There aren’t many stains on the dress, just some spots on the hem. Mama Randolph, Quint’s mother and Meggie’s mother-in-law, ironed the dress this morning, and then gave it to Meggie with a patient and expectant smile before locking the bedroom door once more. Meggie knows that Mama likes the dress because it isn’t quite as much a reminder of the bad situation as are the other blotted and bloodied outfits in Meggie’s footed wardrobe.

From the open window, a benign breeze passes through the screen, stirring the curtains. But the breeze dies in the middle of the floor because there are no other windows in the room to allow it to leave. The summer heat, however, is quite at home in the room, and has settled for a long stay.

There has been no rain for the past fourteen days. Meggie has been marking the days off on the Shenandoah Dairy calendar she keeps under her bed. Mama has not talked about a grandchild in almost a month now; Meggie keeps the calendar marked for that, as well. Mama Randolph’s smile and the freshly ironed dress lets Meggie know that the cycle has come ’round again.

Meggie moves from the bed to the window to the bed. There is a chair in the comer by the door, but the cushion smells bad and so she doesn’t like to sit on it. The mattress on the bed smells worse than the chair, but there is a clean comer that she uses when she is tired. She paces about, feeling the soft swing of her hair about her shoulders as she rocks her head back and forth, remembering the feel of Quint’s own warm hair in the sunlight of past Julys and the softness of the dark curls that made a sweet pillow of his chest.

At the window, Meggie glances out through the screen, down to the chain-linked yard below. The weeds there are wild and a tall and tangled like briars in the forest. The fence is covered with honeysuckle. There is the remainder of the sandbox Quint used as a child. It is nearly returned to the soil now, and black-eyed Susans have found themselves a home. Mama says it will be a fine thing when there is a child to enjoy the yard once again. She says when the child comes she and Meggie will clean up the yard and make it into a playground that any other child in Norton County will envy.

Mama had slapped Meggie when Meggie said she didn’t know if there would ever be any more children in the county.

On the nightstand beside Meggie’s bed is a chipped vase with a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace, sweet peas, red clover, and chicory. Mama said it was a gift from Quint, but Meggie knows Quint is long past picking gifts of wildflowers. Beside the vase is a picture of Meggie and Quint on their wedding day three years ago. Meggie wears a white floor length dress and clutches a single white carnation. Quint grins shyly at the camera, the new beard Meggie had loved just a dark shadow across his lower face. It would be four months before the beard was full enough to satisfy him, although it never satisfied his mother.

“You live in my house, you do as I say, you hear me?” she had told Quint. And although Meggie believed in the premise of that command, and managed to follow the rules, Quint always had a way of getting by with what he wanted by joking and cajoling his mother. And in the dark privacy of night, while cuddling with Meggie in bed, he would promise that it wouldn’t be long before he had saved enough money to build them their own small house on the back acre Mama had given him by the river.

But that was back when Quint worked the farm for his mother and held an evening job at the Joy Food Mart and Gas Station out on Route 146. Back when they had a savings account in the Farmers’ Bank in Henford and Meggie happily collected her mother-in-law’s cast off dishes to use as her own when the house by the river was built.

And then came the change. Things in Norton County flipped ass over teakettle. Old dead Mrs. Lowry had sat up in her coffin at the funeral home, grunting and snarling, her eyes washed white with the preserving chemicals but her mouth chattering for something hot and living to eat. Then Mr. Conrad, Quint’s boss down at the Joy Food Mart and Gas Station, had keeled over while changing a tire and died on the spot of a heart attack. Before Quint could finish dialing the number of the Norton volunteer rescue squad, Conrad was up again and licking his newly dead lips, his hands racked with spasms but his teeth keen for a taste of Quint-neck. Quint hosed him down with unleaded and tossed in his Bic lighter and then cried when it was over because he couldn’t believe what had happened.

They all believe now, alrighty.

The dead wander the gravel roads and eat what they may, and everyone in Norton County knows it is no joke because they’ve all seen one or two of the dead, at least. The newspapers say it’s a problem all over now; the big cities like Richmond and D.C. and Chicago got dead coming out of their ears. There is a constant battle in the cities because there are so many. In Norton County it is a problem, and a couple people have been eaten, but mostly the walking dead get burned with gasoline or get avoided by the careful.

A thud in the downstairs hallway causes Meggie to jump and clasp her hands to the bodice of her yellow dress. The permanent chicken bone of fear that resides in her chest makes a painful turn. She presses her fists deep into the pain. She waits. Sweat beads on her arms and between her breasts. Mama Randolph does not come