David J. Schow’s most recent novels are Gun Work and Internecine. He is also the author of the novels The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Bullets of Rain, and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut. One of the early innovators of zombie fiction, he is the author of the notorious story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” which, along with several other zombie tales, appears in the collection Zombie Jam. Schow has done a lot of work in television and film, including co-writing (with John Shirley) the screenplay for The Crow and writing teleplays for Showtime’s Masters of Horror. Schow is also generally considered to be the originator of the term “splatterpunk.”
Our lives are full of things that we wish would just go away: worries, fears, doubts. Also bills, advertisements, and enemies. And also, of course, rotting corpses. Them most of all. Alas, in the case of zombies, these things we never wanted to see again have returned, and while they may run amuck in our streets, cause our civilization to collapse, and bite and convert our neighbors and friends, at least we can be consoled by the knowledge that they can be stopped by a bullet through the brain, and that this time—dammit—they’re staying down.
It’s troubling when something you’re trying to get rid of comes back once when all the laws of reason and common sense say it can’t, but how much worse is it when that same unwanted thing keeps coming back over and over again? As children, many of us were given nightmares by a Warner Bros. cartoon in which a family goes to ever more elaborate lengths to abandon its incredibly annoying dog, only to have the dog show up at the front door again and again and again. If the cartoonists thought this sort of thing was amusing, they were wrong—it’s terrifying, a fact Stephen King well understood when he wrote his story “The Monkey,” about a cursed toy that simply cannot be disposed of. Our next story combines these two ideas. It’s bad enough when a rotting corpse comes crawling home. But what if it turns into a habit?
Victor Jacks ambled through the back door to ruin their lives on Thurs-day. Which was a pain, since Victor had been pronounced dead the pre-vious Saturday.
“Stubborn sumbitch.” Renny reached under the bed for the ballbat. He was on hands and knees, forced to paw around until it finally came out with dustballs and hair kitties chasing it. Renny, who was allergic to animal dander, sneezed ear-poppingly. This trebled his rage.
Renny’s life was one that Victor’s back-from-the-dead encore was designed to ruin. Barb’s was the other. Just now she was backed into a corner, shrieking like an ingenue in a fifty-year-old horror film. Unlike those World War II heroines, she was naked. Renny still had his socks on. Apart from his Timex, he was garbless, but for the baseball bat. This, he refused to yield in the name of mere modesty.
Victor looked a bit shaggy, having been deceased for the better part of the work week. His shoulder blades, butt and legs down to the heels were blue-black with dependent lividity. His eyes were so crusty that one was welded shut. His hair was lank and wild, the most alive thing about him; his skin tone hung somewhere between catgut and bottled pig’s knuckle.
He crackled as he moved. That would be rigor.
He had obviously been walking for some time. At each of his joints the dry flesh had split into gummy wounds with chafed and elevated flaps. The distance from the morgue to Barb’s bedroom was about twelve pedestrian miles.
Provided, that is, Victor had come here directly, after sitting up on his slab and deciding to ruin their lives, Renny thought. And that pissed him off even more.
Renny’s next explosive sneeze spoiled his aim. He wiped his nose with his forearm. Barb kept screaming, totally out of character for her, and Renny wished in a mean flash that she would either faint or die.
Enough.
At the crack point it was the batting that mattered, not the invec-tive. The bulb end of the bat smashed Victor’s dead left ear deep into the dead left hemisphere of his dead brain. Victor wobbled and missed his zombie grab for Renny. He didn’t have a chance.
Renny was foaming and lunatic, swinging and connecting, swinging and connecting, making pulp. It was what he had ached to do to Victor all along. What he had fantasized about doing to Victor just last week, when Victor was still alive. His yelling finally drowned out Barb, who was still shrunken fetally into her corner, her eyes seeking the deep retreat of trauma.