The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

found in Hammer movies. After all, you killed the Hammer Dracula the same way you killed the Universal Dracula — ram a stake through that sucker’s heart and you were good to go. But the old familiar fix-its weren’t going to fly this time out. No way. Director George Romero’s movie featured something new—armies of flesh-eating zombies that could only be destroyed by serious head trauma. Mix that with some late sixties we’re knee-deep in Vietnam and the world is going to hell in a handbasket attitude and a hyper-realistic style rarely used in horror movies, toss in a black “everyman” hero (Duane Jones), and you had yourself a real mindslammer. My brother, who usually amused himself by grabbing me from behind whenever a cinematic “boo” moment arrived, was actually the first one to jump the night we saw NOTLD. During one of the film’s few quiet moments, a zombie unexpectedly reaches through a window and paws at Duane Jones, and the shock jolted Larry so hard that he actually jumped up and hit his head on the car roof.

Things got worse for old Duane as the movie progressed. You bet they did. Boarded up in an old Pennsylvanian farmhouse with a bunch of people who refused to listen to sense, he had no real chance of escape, and neither did I. I was sucked straight into his world, fending off an army of zombies who wanted Duane and his pals for dinner.

Yeah. I was trapped… until I began to consider what waited in the moonlit shadows outside the corners of the drive-in screen. See, the drive-in in my hometown had not one… not two… but three cemeteries as neighbors. Realizing that, a nasty little idea began to nibble at the corners of my imagination. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the dead folks in those cemeteries clawed their way out of their graves and came shuffling across the road to pay us a little visit.

I stared through the Mustang’s side window. A fence topped with barbed-wire bordered the drive-in, but I didn’t think it (or the retractable tire spikes at the exit) would slow down a determined army of the living dead. Across the road, the cemetery waited. This one was the oldest of the three, and it had the whole gothic atmosphere thing going—mausoleums with stained glass windows, marble funereal monuments, and granite statuary. My eyes studied silhouettes in the moonlight. A lot of cold black stone out there. None of it moved at all. Only the trees moved, branches swaying in the late night breeze.

Well, that made sense, I told myself. Even if the dead were to return to life, the folks in the old cemetery had been dead a long time. I figured most of their coffins didn’t hold much more than a pile of bones… or maybe a couple fistfuls of dust. Even if the occupants of those coffins managed the Lazarus trick, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and actually do anything.

So I wasn’t too worried about the dead in the old cemetery. No. But the new cemeteries—which included the one behind us—were something else indeed.

They didn’t look nearly as scary as the old gothic cemetery. There were no imposing granite monuments or statuary. The new cemeteries had plain little bronze placards planted in the grass. Really, they weren’t very frightening at all.

But when you’re talking living dead, I knew that what counted was under the ground, not above it… the same way I knew that there were lots of fresh graves in the cemetery behind us, and each one of them held a recently deceased corpse.

I always avoided fresh graves when walking home through the cemetery. They creeped me right out, almost as much as seeing the gravediggers at work. I’d seen that a few times while hanging around with my buddy Chris. We’d be riding our bikes around the drive-in lot, and we’d happen to look across the road and see a couple of guys working with a backhoe, digging holes for people who’d been sucking wind just a couple days before.

Up on the screen, the zombies got the crazy blonde girl. I sat there watching Duane Jones fight off the living dead, and I thought about that cemetery behind me, and I wondered what I’d do if the “fresh ones” in the new cemetery started coming out of the ground.

I didn’t like thinking about that. I’d known more than a few people who were buried in that cemetery. My own grandfather was buried up there. So was the alcoholic barber who’d nearly sliced off my ear. And there were other people. Neighbors I’d liked and disliked, old ladies whose windows I’d soaped on Halloween —

Imaginatively speaking, I knew that I was treading dangerous ground. I knew I should concentrate on the movie. Sure, it was scary, but it wasn’t as frightening as the things my imagination churned up. Those things couldn’t be contained between four corners on a drive-in screen. They had dimension, and strength, and a reality all their own —

I imagined what I’d do if the zombies came stumbling across the road. I was just a kid. I couldn’t drive (just like the crazy blonde girl in the movie)… but for some reason I was the one sitting behind the steering wheel, so I’d have to get out of the front seat and switch places with my brother. Who knew how long that would take. It didn’t seem like the zombies in the movie were very fast, but there were a lot of them, the same way there were a lot of people buried in the cemetery. And once they got hold of you—

I could almost see them coming.

The dead neighbors who didn’t like me…

That crazy barber, a rusty razor in his hand…

The husks of withered old ladies who’d dropped Halloween candy in my trick-or-treat bag, leering like Graham Ingels characters in some old E. C. comic…

“You soaped our windows, Norman! And now you’ll die!”

For years after that night, I had NOTLD dreams in which I’d wake up, open my bedroom drapes, and see the streets teaming with zombies. Sometimes I’d try to barricade myself in the house, boarding up the windows and the doors. Sometimes I’d escape on my bicycle, pedaling as fast as I could, and I’d head for a friend’s house… preferably one whose parents owned lots of guns.

But no matter what I did, I was never safe when those dreams ended.

They weren’t the kind of dreams that ended that way.

My buddy Chris moved away before I started sixth grade. By the time I entered junior high school, my brother had transferred to a college in Oregon. I looked around and figured out that I’d lost both my “in’s” at the drive-in. I still wanted to see a lot of the movies that played there, but they weren’t the kind of movies my parents were likely to take me to see. And, needless to say, I was a long way from having a driver’s license.

But necessity is the mother of invention and all that. The drive-in was only about a mile from my house. So was that new cemetery I’d worried about while watching NOTLD. Along with some of the other kids in my neighborhood, I began to put two and two together. Pretty soon we hatched a plan — we could sneak over to the cemetery at night, hunt up a spot where we could see the drive-in screen, and catch at least one movie before the eleven o’clock curfew most of our parents imposed.

It seemed like we could pull it off. It was summertime. The weather was California perfect. At night, our parents were happy to turn us loose so they could relax in peace after a hot day. Usually we’d play street football, tear around on our bikes and skateboards, or head over to someone’s house and watch television reruns if we got bored. We weren’t exactly missed if we didn’t show up for two or three hours.

I remember a lot of things about those summer nights. I remember the scent of anise, a hot licorice smell that drifted from plants we called “skunk cabbage.” I remember the buzz of mosquitoes and street lights, and the one-speaker backbeat of A. M. radio rock on KFRC and KYA out of San Francisco. I remember arguing about the real identity of the Zodiac Killer (who’d begun his murderous spree in my hometown), and whether Paul McCartney was really dead or not, and how many gunmen were on that grassy knoll in Dallas. And I remember our walks to the cemetery.

We’d start at the edge of our housing tract, where the street dead-ended. There was a marsh on the other side of the bent guardrail that marked the boundary of our neighborhood, and we had to be careful there… one slip and you’d end up with a swamped tennis shoe that would squeak all night. But if we were careful, and if there was a good moon, we could make it across the marsh easily. Usually we didn’t even need a flashlight.

At the other side of the marsh, we’d work our way through stands of cattails to the music of croaking bullfrogs, and when we left the cattails behind we’d find ourselves at the edge of the cemetery. There wasn’t even a fence around the place. No kind of boundary at all. Just a wall of cattails, and then a well-manicured lawn.

The cemetery sloped up a hill. A paved road wound through the place, but we never followed that. We’d cross the grass, picking our way around the grave markers—my own grandfather’s, the alcoholic barber’s, the