Best New Zombie Tales: Vol. 1 Part 30

"Then what?"

"Then, Jeff, I'm going to skin you alive. SKN-3 will keep you conscious for most of the operation. Won't it be interesting to watch as your flesh is peeled off?"

"No!" Jeff began yelling for help again. Dr. Stillson let him shout without trying to stop him. He sat calmly and watched his patient, smiling when he saw the drug was working. Jeff's eyes bulged in their sockets and his face turned red as if he were blushing deeply. He trembled slightly. His heart beat rapidly beneath his skin, causing the flesh of his chest to pulsate.

"My hair's crawling," Jeff said. "Are there bugs in it?"

"No, it just feels that way," the doctor told him. "I think we're ready to begin." He stood up, pushed the chair out of his way, lifted the scalpel from the tray, and pushed the cart back beside the discarded chair. He stepped close to the trembling man on his table.

"No. Please. I'll give you anything," Jeff begged, his voice hoa.r.s.e with fright. "Anything you want."

"All I want from you, Jeff, is revenge," Dr. Stillson said. "And I'm about to have it."

Jeffrey Davies howled when the cold steel of the scalpel touched his super-sensitive skin. Dr. Stillson ignored the noise and concentrated on his cutting. He made an incision from a point a few inches below the Adam's apple to just above the start of the pubic hair. The cut swelled with ripe, red blood that soon spilled from its ca.n.a.l and ran down the man's hairless chest and stomach. Jeff continued to shriek with pain, and the doctor smiled to himself as he made his next cut along the inside of the left arm, then the right, and then the legs. He joined the slits on Jeff's limbs to the first cut on his torso, and peeled the flesh away from the carca.s.s. Jeff's screams became louder and shriller, reaching an octave that Dr. Stillson would have believed impossible coming from the human throat.

Jeff's ropy red muscles glistened beneath the room's naked hundred-watt bulb. Within moments after his insides were exposed, Jeff pa.s.sed out.

Dr. Stillson looked at his watch.

"Good," he judged. "You stayed awake for the best parts, Jeffy. Thanks to my little drug."

The doctor completed his job, his face a mask of concentration. He cut from the top of his first incision, below the Adam's apple, around the base of the neck as far as he could reach. He untied Jeff and rolled the body over so he could complete the cuts on the wrists and ankles, then, bringing the cut from the man's neck up around the hairline and back to the forehead.

Taking hold of Jeff's blond hair, Dr. Stillson pulled slowly and steadily. The scalp lifted, and with a little help, the rest of the man's flesh came away from his back with a wet, sucking sound. Dr. Stillson lifted the skin away from the calves carefully so as not to tear the trophy, and then spread the dripping hide on his floor, inside up.

Leaving the body on the table for a moment, the doctor went to a cabinet and took out several white rags. He knelt beside his prize skin and wiped away the blood. When the inside was clean, he flipped the hide over and wiped the streaks of crimson from the front.

The skinless body still glistened wetly on the table. Dr. Stillson stood looking at it for a long moment. He smiled. "Happy Halloween, Jeffy," he said. "I love your costume."

He brought a bone saw from a drawer. Quickly and expertly he cut Jeff's body into small pieces, which he put into two Hefty Cinch Sacks along with the b.l.o.o.d.y rags. He then cleaned his examination table and the floor around it, added the rags to the plastic bags, and closed them up. He pulled them to the far corner of the room to wait until he could hire a couple of junkies to dispose of them. Happy with a job well done, the doctor looked at the skin laid out on the floor.

"I feel better, Jeff," he said. "Thank you." He took the small bottle of SKN-3 from the tray and examined the remaining fluid. "And thank you for keeping him awake long enough to make my task thoroughly enjoyable." He tossed the gla.s.s vial into the air, holding his palm out to catch it.

The bottle went up, tumbling end over end, and began its descent. The fluid within rolled from cork to bottom and back as gravity demanded. The bottle hit Dr. Stillson's upturned palm and bounced up before he could close his fingers around it. Again the bottle sailed through the air. It hit the skin stretched on the floor and shattered on impact with the hard linoleum beneath. Gla.s.s fragments flew like sparks in all directions as the liquid spread in a small stain.

"s.h.i.t!" The doctor glared at the mess. He stooped, picking the pieces of gla.s.s off the skin and the floor; then he went for another rag to wipe up the formula. When he returned, the SKN-3 had soaked into the hide, leaving a small stain that looked like a birthmark.

"Oh well," Stillson said, "I suppose I didn't need the rest of it anyway." He dropped the rag onto his table and left the room, turning out the light.

He went to his bathroom and quickly showered, then to his bedroom and lay down, wearing only his underwear. He was asleep within minutes.

In his examination room, the skin began to move. At first the activity was only in the area where the fluid had stained the hide, a small rippling motion. Soon, however, the movement traveled outward until the entire hide was flowing, wave-like, from the headless scalp to the feetless legs and handless arms. The rippling became concentrated, and the skin began to inch its way across the floor toward the open doorway.

In the living room of the house it rolled itself into a turn and rippled past a worn chair, the outstretched arm brushing the leg of an end table. The jack-o-lantern in the window took no notice. The skin slithered into a short hallway and then over the threshold of Daniel Stillson's bedroom. It crossed the hardwood floor and was soon at the foot of the narrow bed. Snake-like, it raised itself up until the scalp seemed to be peeking over the edge of the bed. The top part of the skin flopped down onto the mattress and pulled the bottom of the torso and the legs up after it.

The skin quickly covered Dr. Stillson's nearly naked body, wrapping the empty husks of its arms and legs around the sleeping doctor. It began to squeeze.

Daniel Stillson woke up slowly, thinking at first that some of the neighborhood heavies had broken in and wanted drugs. He would give them something that would knock them on their a.s.ses for disturbing him. He looked through bleary eyes and saw the skin of Jeffrey Davies wrapped around him. He screamed.

The piece of flesh on the top end of the hide flopped forward. Dr. Stillson sucked Jeff's starchy hair down his throat and gagged.

As the doctor fought to free himself from the skin, the empty hide wrapped itself tighter around him, hugging out the small breaths he could draw around the hair in his throat. At last he lay still, his body limp, his gray eyes like specks of polished gla.s.s staring at the water-stained ceiling.

The skin continued squeezing for several hours, until all of Dr. Stillson's SKN-3 drug had evaporated from the flesh.

Fishing JASON BRANNON.

Just looking at it, the ocean seems pretty one-dimensional, empty, like crinkled cellophane flat over the earth. At first glance, all you see is a reflection or two, waves and froth and the occasional seagull. Sometimes a fish will surface, look at the world and decide that everything stinks of pollution, death, and immorality, before submerging itself once again. Smart creatures, those fish.

Sunlight glinting off of the mirrored surface makes it hard to see anything but quicksilver shapes doing the hula in front of yours eyes. But there's nothing else to see anyway. Right?

Wrong. There's plenty to see if you know where to look. The ocean is the world's biggest casket. Think about how many things live and die unseen beneath the surface. Think about the infinite number of creatures that shut their eyes for the last time in the thrall of dark currents without ever seeing the sun or the moon or the clouds that drift lazily overhead. Think about all the other things that aren't born of water that take their last breath and then sink to the bottom. Boats. Sailors. Fishermen. Wrecked planes. Lovers.

Lovers...

Now there's an odd choice to add to that list. But it's the main reason I'm here, sitting in the sand, summoning ghosts from the bottom of the sea. Some might call what I do necromancy. Others might call it sick and depraved. I call it desperate. All I'm really doing is looking for love. Isn't that what everyone does at some point or another? I'm just looking in a different place than most.

Truth be told, I had that perfect mate once and I lost her. Actually, I killed the woman I loved and dumped her in the middle of the ocean. It was a complicated time. My head was in another place. I could give a hundred other excuses. None of them would change what I did.

On the day we were sailing I was drunk, as was my normal custom. The day was beautiful. We had a picnic lunch out on the deck of my boat. Amber was wearing the floral-print bikini that I liked so much. A smile seemed to be permanently drawn onto her face. I couldn't help but feel happy as well. Everything was perfect.

Until Amber told me she was pregnant.

I snapped. I couldn't help it. I didn't want any explanations or consolations. I just wanted things to be like they were before Amber made her little confession. That, of course, wasn't going to happen.

It was like she was flaunting my own inadequacies in front of my face. I'm not normally the type to lose my temper, but this was different. This was a problem I had been struggling with for a long time, and here Amber was announcing that she was going to have a baby. Of course, she didn't know about my problem. It's not something I had ever discussed with her.

It was something we would never get the chance to talk about. Even now, thinking back, I don't remember putting my hands around her neck. But I must have done it. The marks around her throat told the story well enough.

Once Amber stopped flopping around the deck I panicked and threw her into the ocean. It's not the sort of thing you usually do to a loved one. Then again, neither is choking the life out of them. In the span of a few minutes I had done both.

All my life I've dealt with a certain gift, and I briefly considered using it as Amber bobbed up and down in the water like a fisherman's cork. I could have fixed everything, made everything right again. All it would have taken was a simple touch of my hand to send life flooding back into Amber's body.

So why didn't I?

I suppose it's complicated. A man doesn't really think too clearly when his head is full of booze and murderous thoughts and feelings of inadequacy. I guess the bottom line is that I panicked. It's not everyday that I murder someone in cold blood and throw them out to sea to be nibbled on by hungry fish.

It's not everyday I go fishing for corpses either.

Do you have any idea just how many dead things are in the ocean? Even I wasn't really aware of how monumental this task would be until the dead started emerging from tidal depths like bits of driftwood washing onto the beach.

To make things a little more clear, I have a certain affinity with the dead. Not in that 'I see dead people' kind of way, but in a different symbiotic way, like the relationship between a mind and body, one depending on the other. Mostly them depending on me. I can feel them out there, waiting to be used again, waiting to be filled up with a soul and a spirit. That's why they respond so well to me. I whisper promises to them, vowing to give them life and purpose again, and they come to me.

I've never called on the dead on such a grand scale as I've been doing for the past three days. Given the number of bodies lying at the bottom of the ocean, I wasn't even sure how to start or what to expect. What I didn't expect was to see the half-eaten bodies of sailors, fighter pilots who crashed into the ocean, swimmers who became lunch for the sharks, and even the sharks themselves. Some of them even had enough cohesion left about them to actually stagger ash.o.r.e before realizing that the promises I whispered were mere lies.

With every new disappointment, I sat as still as I possibly could and listened hard, hoping to hear Amber's sweet voice calling to me from amongst the waves. Becalmed by the murmurings of the sea, I drew pictures in the sand with a bit of driftwood. The pictures were of Amber and me. And the baby.

I wonder how I'll react to the sight of her after days at the bottom of the sea. She won't look the same. Decay will have likely set in. The fish will have taken their nibbles. Curious varieties of marine plankton may have established their colonies on her skin.

I'd like to say things will be as they were before; that's what I hope. But I'm realistic. Things can never be as the same. They can be close. But not identical.

It will be like making a photocopy. The second chapter in our lives together will be like an incoming fax of the first. At first glance it will look basically the same. But there will be that fuzziness around the edges that makes it a little different, a little more grainy, a little less clear. I'll know that there's a baby in Amber's womb. I'll also know that the baby's not mine.

I won't bring it back from the dead unless Amber convinces me otherwise.

As I sit here, hooking and releasing the dead, a dolphin carca.s.s washes ash.o.r.e. It's been bitten in half. A shark has likely made a meal off of the poor, defenseless creature. One of its flippers waves to and fro like the hand of a wannabe beauty queen in a small-town parade. I feel sorry for it and kick it into the waters where something can finish it off. One black, forlorn eye stares back at me. I try to ignore it. But, somehow, that blank, lifeless stare reminds me of what the eyes of that unborn child must look like, peering around in that dismal prison that is Amber's womb, wondering what went wrong. I try to put it out of my mind and do so with some success.

Eventually the darkness wanes as the moon trades places with the sun. I can see the extent of the carnage I raised from sub-aquatic depths. The water is full of chunks of dead meat and the fins of hungry sharks. Detritus left over from murdered ships floats lazily on the currents. Still, no Amber. I clear my mind of everything and remember the good times we shared. The day we first said 'I love you.' The first time she slept in my bed. The first time we had that conversation about the rest of our lives, only to discover that we both had the same optimistic outlook.

That was all it took to summon her when the other feelings wouldn't do the trick.

She emerged from the oily black depths like the princess of some sub-aquatic kingdom, all glistening and wet and fresh like a baby out of the womb. I was a little surprised to see that her stomach was distended when she emerged from the dark water. There had been no indications before I killed her to suggest that Amber was pregnant and I couldn't figure out why there should be now. The baby wasn't still alive in there. I hadn't brought it back from the abyss.

Then I saw the smile on Amber's face and realized that she was flaunting her secret in my face. She thought it was funny that this was the way things had turned out.

Or maybe she was just so proud of the human cargo she carried inside of her that she couldn't rid her face of the smile that might have only been a death rictus.

"That's not mine, you know?" I said, pointing to Amber's stomach. One milky eye swiveled and turned to follow my finger.

"Yours," she hissed insistently.

"No," I said. "I'm infertile."

Amber looked at me oddly. "Yours," she said. "And no one else's."

"You just don't get it," I said.

"Why did you kill me and bring me back?"

And there it was, the very question I had been asking myself. Even now, I wasn't sure I had the answer.

"I killed you because I knew you had been unfaithful to me. You betrayed me after all the good times we shared. I brought you back because I wanted you to know why I killed you. I wanted you to realize that I knew you were cheating on me."

"I didn't," she insisted. "No one else. You were the only one. I loved you."

"You're lying," I said, but I wasn't really sure anymore. Amber was dead now. There was nothing else I could do to her. She had no reason to lie at this juncture.

"You are the only one who could be the father," Amber insisted. Her blue lips trembled with each word she spoke.

"I am not physically capable of fathering a child," I stammered. "Don't you understand that?"

"Doctors make mistakes too," Amber said.

I wanted to say something else, but I knew she was right. Doctors weren't infallible. Even the best ones gave faulty diagnoses sometimes.

"Prove it to me," I said. "Show me that you're telling the truth."

She took the pocketknife from my hand and slowly inserted it into her abdomen. It reminded me of someone about to segment an orange. The knife was dull, but the flesh was rotten. The blade cut through the skin easily enough. Amber pulled the flaps of flesh back like curtains in front of a window.

That's when I saw my son for the first time and realized that Amber was, in fact, telling the truth. He looked just like me all the way down to the patrician slant of the nose, the prominent chin, and the wisps of black hair. I couldn't deny him.

I realized at that moment what I had thrown away in a fit of jealous anger. It seemed impossible that I could be the father of that withered fetus, but there was no getting around it.

It was like having a ready-made family. The only part needed was a father and husband. That role was mine.

I ran a trembling hand through my thinning hair and looked around at all the piles of bones that I had summoned from the deep in order to get to this point. I couldn't help thinking that things would have been a lot simpler had I just taken that extra moment to allow Amber an explanation rather than throttling her to death. I could have had a living family instead of this bone-yard byproduct.

Nonetheless, this is what I was meant to have. This was my family. These were the people I was meant to be with and love. I just took a circuitous route to get to this point.

"Can you ever forgive me for what I've done?" I asked Amber as tears rolled down my cheeks.

Amber smiled at me with blue lips. "We'll work it out," she rasped.

I pulled her close to me, barely noticing her rotten flesh and the way it felt like wet Styrofoam. I hardly winced at her salt.w.a.ter stench.

"Bring him back too," Amber urged, putting her arm around my waist. In that moment, I knew what every delivery room father feels like when he sees his child open its eyes for the first time.

Amber smiled and parted the flaps of skin that covered the baby.

The little boymy sonwriggled and squirmed.

Amber gently removed him from her abdomen and held him to her breast.

"Do you want to hold him?" she asked.

Of course, I did.

Most fishermen cast their lines and throw their nets in search of fish. Sometimes they catch something of value. Sometimes not. I think I beat even the best of them on their most successful day.

I've never met an angler who went out on the water and caught a family.

Groundwood BEV VINCENT.

For a while it seemed like the tide had turned against us permanently. Since that dumb a.s.s down in D.C. had deployed our soldiers to every corner of the planet except where they were needed, it took a while before we could mount a defence. I pa.s.sed those tense days in front of the TV, tryin' to decide how to use the five bullets in the magazine of the Walther P38 my daddy brought home from Germany. If those G.o.d-forsaken creatures had reached a city, I believe it would have been all over for everyone back then, including Gilbert Marcoux-that's me.

After our guys finally got back from overseas, they killed every last one of 'em. I say "killed" like they was alive-but they weren't. Not really. Anyway, they stacked those abominations in fields like so much cordwood, under armed guard in case they happened to forget they was dead again. Most folks was afraid they'd come crawling out of the ground if they was buried, and I can't blame 'em. Happened once, after all-could happen again.

On television, smarter people'n me argued over what to do with 'em. The tree huggers got their panties in a twist when someone proposed burning, going on about poisoning the atmosphere and global warming as if we hadn't all just almost died on account of something far worse than carbon dioxide and meltin' icecaps.

No one had a jeezly clue where the infection came from or how to make sure it was gone for good. Then a politician suggested grindin' the remains up and turning 'em into paper, the kind of idea you'd expect in a state covered with trees. The notion took hold. Even satisfied the eco-nutjobs. A green solution, they called it, and everyone was happy.