Tim Curran - Resurrection

That brought a laugh from Wanda that was dry and bitter-sounding. “Zombies? Heh, heh, now that’s a laugh riot indeed! But such words will serve to name them that cannot be named. A zombie is something conjured, I understand, a mindless thing lacking soul and will that chops cane in Guadeloupe and Haiti and such places. Also, a particularly ridiculous shambler of the cinema. But these things? No and yes. I would not name them. You believe they are folks that have come out of their graves to bring evil and make a certain mischief amongst the living, eh?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m thinking.”

Wanda nodded. “Well, you are right and wrong. Yes, they have sheered the veil and come back, but there was no fancy conjuring done, not on purpose, I think. This was not meant to be, but an accident. Listen, Mr. Tommy, them things may have died as Joe Blow or Mary Jane Pissy Pie, but what they’ve returned as is something else indeed. The souls of Joe and Mary have gone traveling, but there are others in the void looking for occupancy. And these were not born as such. No, they are scavengers that have come to roost in the shells of the newly risen…like crows and buzzards attracted to bad meat, these things have been waiting a long time to be born.”

Mitch felt a heaviness in his limbs. He said, “They…they don’t like salt.”

“No, son, and they probably don’t fancy iron nor fire.”

“What should we do?” Tommy asked her.

“I’m not quite sure, son. But I can read the both of you and I know you plan to stand and fight. I will stand with you. But you had better be off to tell the others. They won’t listen, but you can try. And maybe later, you can come back and talk to me. Leave me one of those cigarettes and latch the door on your way out.”

“We can’t just-”

“Leave me here, Mitch? A frail old woman not in her right mind?” Wanda laughed at that, too. “Off with the both of you. When the time is right, I think, you will come back and I will be here.”

“Well, now that was a rush,” Tommy said when they were down the walk from Wanda Sepperly’s. “I ain’t got enough trouble with zombies, you bring me to meet the local witch. Greetings, boils and ghouls, hee, hee, hee!”

“Jesus Christ, Tommy, don’t be such an asshole.”

“Well, my mother always said to go with my strengths.”

“Wanda’s okay,” Mitch said. “Just a little…ah…eccentric.”

Tommy thought that was funny. “Eccentric? Holy shit, Mitch, that what you call eccentric? My cousin Lyle collected wooden dressmaker’s dummies and Victorian parasols. He was queer as they come, but a hell of a nice guy. My mother always said he was eccentric. I agree. But Mother Sepperley? Damn, that’s not eccentric, that’s scary.”

“Ah, you liked her and you know it.”

“I did. She was strange, but she was my kind of strange.”

Mitch walked through the deepening puddles. “Trust me, Tommy, she’s spooky, but you haven’t met the real witch in this neighborhood, but you will.”

“Oh Christ.”

The Zirblanski house was next and nobody answered the door.

So on they went to the Blake house, but only after Mitch warned Tommy that he was about to meet the real witch of Kneale Street. Mitch explained that she had a lot of guns and she liked to use them.

“Just keep your head down,” he said.

“I’m not liking this,” Tommy said.

“I’d like to say she’s harmless, but I don’t think she is. Miriam Blake had her way, she’d shoot anyone that wasn’t white, Christian, and carrying a firearm.”

Now that Tommy had been prepared, they went right up on the porch and that was when the first shot rang out. Had Tommy been any closer to that doorbell, he would have lost his hand.

“Holy shit!” Tommy cried as he and Mitch hit the porch on their bellies.

Inside, there was screaming and shouting and the sound of something crashing. Then the door opened and Mitch saw Rhonda Zirblanski standing there. She was a tough little shit, he knew, but there were tears in her eyes.

“She told us to shoot whoever came through the door,” Rhonda said. “She gave us guns. Said anybody that came to the door was here to rape and rob and murder. She gave us guns, but we didn’t shoot, Mr. Barron! I swear, we didn’t shoot!”

Mitch rose slowly and when he did, tough or not, Rhonda fell right in his arms and he took hold of her, afraid for one frightening moment that she had been shot. But that wasn’t it; she was just overwrought.

When they got inside, they saw Rhonda’s twin, Rita, standing there, looking pissed-off, her eyes just black and simmering like burning pitch. “Hey, Mr. Barron,” she said.

Miriam Blake was on the floor in a blue jogging suit, covering her face with both hands. “Evil effing little bitches! See what they did to me? I take them in, little conniving harlots, and this is how they repay me! It’s their upbringing! Their upbringing! Goddamn parents, that’s what! Goddamn liberal sonsofbitches-”

“You better shut up,” Rita told her and from the tone of her voice, Mitch was thinking that was good advice.

When Miriam peeled her hands away from her face, her mouth was bloody and a blue welt was rising under her right eye.

Mitch sighed as Miriam kept complaining and Rhonda was talking about the guns and how Miriam was a crazy old hag and she knew she wasn’t supposed to say that, but crazy was just crazy, wasn’t it? And Mitch was in stark agreement with her. Tommy grabbed the 12-gauge off the floor that Miriam had tried to pepper them with and not too far away were a couple of little. 32 autos. Tommy shoved them both in the pockets of his raincoat and stood there with the shotgun, looking confused.

When Rhonda was done talking, Mitch said, “She wanted you to shoot us?”

“That’s a lie!” Miriam snapped. “That’s an effing goddamn lie! You little bitch, you little-”

“Shut the hell up,” Tommy told her.

That did it. Miriam sat there, silenced, but hardly out of fight. She glared at Tommy and from that look, he was pretty glad she no longer had access to that Remington pump because she looked just mad enough to use it. Not that he was surprised after the welcome they’d received.

Rhonda started talking again, upset still but calming down an inch at a time. She started repeating verbatim the mad nonsense Miriam had filled her head with: shit about liberal Jews taking over the country and how they controlled the media and the government. How good old American Christian values were being stomped and stifled so that gays could marry and sluts could have abortions. That Hitler had had the right idea because those effing Jews had killed Christ and didn’t they honestly have the Holocaust coming? Well, didn’t they?

Now, Mitch could have given a high hairy shit what Miriam believed in or didn’t believe in, but you didn’t go shoveling this neo-facist bullshit down the throats of impressionable children. You just didn’t.

And handguns? Jesus, you just didn’t pass them out to kids.

“That’s what she kept saying,” Rita told him. “Then when you came up on the porch, she told us to shoot you. And when we wouldn’t, she shot at you instead.”

On the floor, Miriam looked like a cobra all coiled up and ready to spit its venom. Her eyes were fixed and glassy and she was trembling like something in her was ready to explode. Mitch figured if Tommy and he hadn’t been there, she would have killed Rita and Rhonda. Bloody drool was hanging from her lower lip and she did not seem to care.

She made to open her mouth and Tommy shook his head.

She closed it just as quick.

“What happened then?” Mitch asked.

Rita shrugged. “Then I hit her. I punched her in the face twice.”