He gripped it in two hands and raised it. The couple looked up at him then, but it was too late. The gleaming blade sliced through Benny's neck first, then while Lisa was busy screaming, it took her head off.
A messy business, to be sure, but Peter felt it was his duty to rid the world of those who contributed nothing to the well-being of the nation. People like Benny and Lisa Higgins were nothing to the economy. They cost this Great Nation a fortune in welfare. These people went through life taking what they could and offering nothing in return. Maybe the Government felt it had to support them, but Peter Wilkes didn't believe in charity. He believed in ridding the nation of excess garbage, and in the process, he lined his pockets with extra cash.
All those tiny tax returns added up when he put them together, and he had a nice little scam worked out that allowed him to collect the returns without implicating himself. He'd have homeless bums cash the checks with a fake ID, then he'd dispose of the bums and collect the money. It was what was meant by the phrase killing two birds with one stone.
Peter set about cleaning his office. This was the part he hated most about his mission. He'd hire someone to do the job, but it would be difficult to explain all the blood and body parts. He could hear his conversation with a prospective employee; Your duties will include wiping up the bloody messes I leave behind when I sever the heads of my clients. The pay isn't all that good, but oh, the benefits.
There were three more appointments the following night. One of them was a waitress living on a salary of around ten thousand dollars a year, including her meager tips. She seemed such a sweet thing, all bubbly and talkative. Peter didn't understand it. Her life was in the toilet. How could she smile like she did? She should have been miserable.
He left her sitting and smoked a cigarette before he returned with the axe. He almost regretted having to do away with her, as trusting as she was, but business was business. One fell swoop and her head rolled across the floor, bounced against the wall, and changed course. Peter watched until it came to a stop beside the water cooler. The eyes were still open, and Peter swore she still had that stupid grin on her face.
He disposed of her body, along with the day's other victims, and called it a night. On the way home, he stopped off at his favorite pub. He drank two whiskey sours, smoked a couple of cigarettes (he swore he was giving the damn things up one of these days), and passed out a few business cards to what he felt were likely candidates for his special tax cuts.
It was the end of February. He didn't need to drum up business, since this was the time when poor people were starting to clamor to get their returns in. They couldn't wait to take back what little they'd contributed. They couldn't wait to file those returns and get those checks back in their hot little hands so they could blow the money on some frivolous nonsense.
The Nation would be greater without them. They were leeches, sucking the blood from the country. These people simply had to be eradicated.
The government needed a few tax cuts of its own, and until they stopped pandering to the bugs of society, they would never have them. Not without the help of Peter, who considered himself an expert exterminator.
He finished his last drink and left the pub.
Peter was at the office early the next morning. He had a full day ahead of him. He made coffee, sharpened his axe, and unlocked the front door in time to greet his first appointment, a refrigerator of a guy named Ed.
"Hey, there, Mister Wilkes," Ed said, sticking out his beefy hand.
Peter shook his hand.
"Coffee?" Peter asked.
"Don't mind if I do," Ed said.
Of course he didn't. Like the others, Ed would take anything free.
Peter poured two cups of coffee and seated Ed at the desk. He sipped his own coffee as he turned on the computer. While he waited for it to boot up, he made friendly small talk.
"You have a family, Ed?"
"Sure do. Five kids, a wife. . . ."
"What do you do for a living, Ed?"
"Work construction. Been doing it all my life."
"Make good money, do you?"
"Not too bad," Ed said. "Work my ass off for it, though, and it takes every dime I got to take care of the family, if you know what I mean."
Peter nodded.
"I look forward to that refund every year," Ed said. "Like to put it toward a little vacation for me and the family. 'Bout the only way I can afford it, be honest with ya."
Peter punched a couple of keys on the keyboard, then reached for the folder Ed had brought with him. He thumbed through some papers. "I see you have several deductions," he said.
"As many as I could get," Ed said with pride. "I love those deductions."
"I'm sure you do," Peter said dryly.
He prepared Ed's tax return, making polite conversation, and when he finished, he slid the papers across the desk for Ed to sign.
"I'll be right back," he said.
He returned with his axe. Ed was hunched over the table, looking at something on Peter's desk. He turned just as Peter brought the axe down in a sweeping arc. The blade stopped just short of making the trip through Ed's thick neck. Peter cursed and jerked it back. It made a wet sucking noise as it came away, leaving Ed's head drooping to one side, still hanging on by bloody strings of muscle.
Peter swung again, this time lopping the head completely off. He set the axe aside and lit a cigarette, running his bloody fingers through his hair. Ed's head lay on the floor at his feet, staring up at him, the eyes open in a state of permanent confusion.
Peter finished his cigarette, then set about cleaning up the gore. When he finished, he took a shower and dressed for his next appointment. He was nearly ready when he heard glass breaking in the front office.
"Who's there?" he called.
He expected no answer. It was unlikely an intruder would be so kind as to supply an introduction.
Peter's eyes fell on his axe, which leaned against the wall while awaiting its next bit of business. He shot a glance toward the door leading to the front office, where he could now hear shuffling, indicating there was indeed someone out there after all.
He took hold of the axe and moved toward the front office. There were more sounds coming from the other side of the door separating him from the main officea"things being bumped into, papers being rifled. He turned the knob slowly, so as not to attract attention, and pushed the door open. Someone moved past his field of vision right outside the door. Probably a goddamn juvenile delinquent hoping to find extra cash lying around.
Peter pushed into the outer office, hoping to surprise his visitors. He brought his axe back, freezing in mid-swing, his mouth agape as he stared at a woman whose flesh glistened red where her head used to be.
Something moved to his left. He turned sharply, in time to see Ed ambling toward him, carrying his head under one arm. Behind Ed, the dumb couple, Benny and his wife, what was her name?
There was another sound behind hima"the waitress with the stupid grin that was no longer there was bumping into the water cooler. She was holding her head in one hand, fingers tangled in the bloody blonde hair.
More came through the front door. He recognized some, but mostly they were victims he'd not thought of since disposing of them. They were the poor, the homeless, the down and out, the dregs of society. They began to close in on him.
Peter hoped he was dreaming. He'd fallen asleep, that's all. This wasn't Night of the Living Dead, and besides, zombies didn't live with their heads off. Wasn't that the way it worked? He wasn't a big movie buff, but he knew that much. Anybody with half a brain knew that much.
He swung the axe anyway, even if he was dreaming. The blade buried in an arm here, a leg therea"he even lopped off one of the waitress' breasts, but she kept coming. They all kept coming. They circled him until he could no longer swing his axe. Finally, they converged on him completely, groping, tearing at his clothes and then his flesh. They held their decapitated heads to him and the heads began to feast on what the dead things dragged from Peter's writhing body.
He had one last thought before he died. It was a ridiculous thought, but true nonethelessa"these worthless creatures wanted their refund checks.
There Goes the Neighborhood.
Jonesville was a quiet little town with a population of five hundred, not counting the dead that started climbing out of the lake one rainy night in May of 2005. Like most small-town folk, the people of Jonesville were used to their own way of living. They clung to it adamantly, even when the walking dead began to ruin the tranquil rural landscape with their rotting presence.
Truth be told, those that came out of the lake had more right to be there than any of the current residents of Jonesville, but nobody wanted to talk about that. Some things were better left unsaid, you see, and the people of Jonesville knew which things fit neatly into that category.
Most Jonesville residents eventually got used to the dead being around. Some simply tolerated the rotting corpses, so long as said rotting corpses stayed the hell out of the way and remembered their place.
Alan Bainbridge was one of those residents who tolerated the walking dead. He did so only because he wasn't about to let them ruin the good life he'd found in Jonesville.
Alan had purchased a home here for his family, a wife and son. The house sat on the outskirts of town, right near the big lake, and he'd be damned if he was going to let a few rotting corpses force him to leave it all behind. He'd swung a good deal on the house and propertya"a once-in-a-lifetime deal. He would not give it up for a few dead neighbors. Dead wasn't any worse than some of the weirdo fucks he'd been accustomed to living around back when he'd had his family in a low-income trailer park.
Oh sure, it was strange at first, going down to Main Street for groceries and seeing old lady Jenkinson limping back and forth in front of the post office, or pulling into Fred's Garage and seeing Fred himself standing at one of the pumps with a greasy rag and overalls, holding a gas nozzle in one decayed hand while he chewed some imaginary tobacco with gums that were black and slimy with rot.
Strange, sure, but Alan got used to those things pretty quick. His wife Cora thought it would be best if they packed up and left, but Alan wouldn't hear of it. He'd bought his new house for less than half the market value, and the land it sat on had come free with the package. A man wasn't ever going to find a deal like that again, so the stinking corpses could hang out all they wanted, so long as they stayed off his property.
But Cora never shut up. She complained all the time, day in and day out. Her apprehension weighed on Alan's nerves as the days drifted past. In fact, she got to be a real pain in the ass when it came right down to it, always bitching about this or that, never happy that she was finally in her own home, away from the trailer park trash neighbors she used to hate so much.
It made a guy feel unappreciated, but nonetheless, Alan went about his daily routine. He figured she'd eventually come around. One day she'd see how he worked his ass off every day just to make her life as good and comfortable as he could possibly make it. One day she'd appreciate his efforts, by God, because it was a wife's duty to appreciate the efforts of a good man.
And Alan did work hard. He was an office mana"a nine to fivera"and he got up every morning with a cup of coffee and his briefcase. He went to the office and put his time in pushing papers and making deals, and he came home at night to relax in his new home and all its implied success. A man doesn't give up something like that without putting up a fight.
Morning by morning, though, Alan saw the neighborhood beginning to deteriorate at a dramatic pace. What was once a beautiful community built around a large, clear lake was becoming a haven for misfits. Cora's nagging intensified, and the worst part of it was, Alan found it harder to counter her complaints with anything positive.
Jonesville was definitely getting worse. Alan started seeing his neighbor, John Miller, who lived half a mile down the road, dragging his trash can to the curb every morning for a trash truck that didn't run any more. John never wore anything but his briefs, which were now colored with piss and shit stains. A couple of times Alan had even seen John's pasty dick sticking out through the open fly in front of his briefs.
Alan did his best to ignore the things he saw. He still refused to give up his house and his property by the lake, both symbols of all he'd worked so hard to provide for his family. If he had to live among freaks, so be it, because there was no way in hell he'd let them take his success.
"The neighborhood is falling apart, Alan," Cora said one morning. "Do you really want to stay here?"
He was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the morning paper as he drank his second cup of coffee. "I've said it numerous times, dear, I will not let the riff-raff run me away from my home."
He didn't go to work that morning. He made a trip to the nearest big town, Fayetteville, and visited the library. He wasn't sure what he was looking for at first. He began to dig through some old boxes in a dusty back room. He found a collection of old microfiche and sorted through it. Several of them were marked with the words Jonesboro History. Alan found the matronly librarian and asked how he could view the microfiche. She showed him to a back room equipped with an old phonograph, an outdated computer, and a microfiche reader. He thanked her and went to work viewing the microfiche sheets.
What he saw was a revelation to him. A shock to his system. He had not been aware of the dark and traumatic history of his precious Jonesville.
The truth unfolded before his eyes as he scanned old newspaper clippings and articles detailing the contamination of a town called Jonesboro. After several attempts to clean up the chemical contamination in Jonesboro, during which time many of the residents died of toxic infections, the state government declared the town a disaster area and ordered immediate evacuation.
The government eventually flooded Jonesboro, houses and dead residents alike. Signs posted around the outskirts of the massive man-made lake warned potential visitors of toxic contamination if they ventured beyond the posted signs. It was all neat and tidy. Problem taken care of.
And for twenty-five years, Jonesboro stayed that way, abandoned and dead, lying in peace beneath the lake. Only recently had land development started around the Jonesboro lake, leading to the community known as Jonesville, in which Alan had purchased his new home at such a outstanding price.
Alan took all of the incriminating microfiche with him and burned it. No sense letting the secret out. He didn't need a town meeting being called and the government getting involved again. No way was he going to have his home taken away because of some mishap years ago. Far as he was concerned, those that couldn't handle the living dead creeping around their backyards could just pack up and go, but Alan was holding his ground.
He wasn't concerned with rotting corpses. The smell would take some getting used to, but at least the dead were fairly quiet. They shambled around, bumping into stuff, and if a man was unlucky enough to get close, one of them might take a bite from his skull, but by and large, living with the dead wasn't bad.
The next few weeks brought a lull in walking dead activity. Besides the occasional ambling stiff that wandered out of the lake and onto Alan's property (which he quickly dispatched with a shotgun), Alan didn't see much of the corpses at all. He even thought the zombies were staying where they belonged, rotting at the bottom of the lake.
But the respite was brief. The calm before the storm, actually, though Alan didn't realize it at the time. When the dead began to rise from the dark, murky depths of the lake with alarming frequency once again, the last of the living fled Jonesville, giving up their homes. Some of them even joined the ranks of the walking dead, but through it all, Alan held his ground. He wasn't going to be driven away. No thoughtless neighbors were going to force him to give up his residency in Jonesville.
Alan began to lose sleep. He sat up late into the night, staring out at the lake, blasting any maggot-infested thing that rose from the cold black water. His shotgun never left his side. He even kept it with him when he answered nature's call. He took it with him when he went for groceries too.
Old Jim Millstone, the owner of the only store in the community, had long since left Jonesville, leaving everything behind. The grocery supply dwindled, but Alan wasn't deterred. He could pick his groceries up in Fayetteville when he needed to. The drive wasn't all that bad when you got right down to it. Behind the wheel of his car, he could easily dispatch anything that ambled into his path.
Cora began to lose a grip on her sanity. She couldn't take it any longer, and she finally came to the conclusion that leaving Alan was her only option. He was far beyond any help she could give. As far as she was concerned, Alan could stick around and defend his precious house, but she wasn't about to continue with an effort that amounted to nothing more than useless. She tried once again to talk Alan into leaving everything behind, but when he refused to listen to reason, she told him she would be leaving and taking their child with her.
Alan wouldn't hear of it. The nerve of her, thinking she could up and abandon him after he'd worked so hard to give her and their son a better life. What about the wedding vows? What about all that for-better-or-worse bullshit?
They fought. There was a lot of screaming. When Cora grabbed her bags and his son, Alan brought out his shotgun, trusty and handy as it was, and blew her head off. He dragged her to the lake and tossed her into the water.
No chance she'd be coming back. Not with her head all but gone. The movies had gotten that part right. A bullet in the head kept the dead from rising again.
It was the least he could do for Cora.
Killing his son wasn't so easy. Alan hated to do it, he really did, but the boy was better off with his mother. A kid needed his mother. It made no sense that he hadn't let them leave together, if that were truly the case, but this way they were still here, on the property Alan had bought for them.
Alan boarded up the house after Cora was gone. He secured the windows, set traps, and nailed the doors shut. He dug a tunnel leading outside from the basement and fashioned a metal plate over it that could be locked from inside and out, then he camouflaged it. As stupid as the walking dead were, there was little chance of one of them stumbling upon the only working entrance to the house.
Alan stocked his fortress with the last of the supplies he bought in Fayetteville. He went to the little bait shop operated by Ed, who also had a sporting goods store. There were a few guns in the back room of the bait shopa"Ed's personal weapons, Alan guesseda"and Alan took them, along with as much ammunition as he could find.
Ed certainly wouldn't be needing the stuff anymore. Alan had found him lying on the floor behind the cash register. His neck had a hole in one side where something had been chewing at him. Maybe a rat, maybe another one of those dead neighbors. It was a damn shame, really. It made Alan feel a sudden loss for things past.
Alan put a bullet in Ed's head for good measure. Ed had been a pretty good guy. He deserved better than to come back as one of those things.
Life for Alan went on at a snail's pace. He was pretty much alone now, if you didn't count the walking dead. They were everywhere these days, coming out of the lake faster than they ever had before. Alan killed them as fast as they appeared, but it did no good. The corpses were taking over, and fuck if Alan was going to be driven from his home.
Alan took a proactive stance with the zombies. He went on regular missions to dispatch his rotting neighbors. Search and destroy missions that almost always seemed fruitless. There were more of them than he'd first thought. And there was a good mix now, some from the old Jonesboro, others from the more recent Jonesville community.
One night Alan came home from one of his nightly assault missions and found a couple of shambling corpses making themselves at home in his house. He recognized all of them as recent living neighbors, friends even, and now they were invading his space. He'd forgotten to lock the door. That pissed him off. Being that careless could cost him.
He blasted the zombie intruders one by one. He dragged them outside, but not all the way to the lake. He was simply too tired. Keeping the neighbors at bay was wearing him thin, wreaking havoc on his health.
But this house and property was his lifelong dream. He'd worked hard to get where he was. He was here for the long haul, by God. Let the community fall apart around him, but he would die before he'd let the zombies take over. They could eat his brains, and he'd come back to defend his home and property.
When his supplies ran low, Alan had to make another trip to Fayetteville. It had been some time since he'd ventured away from Jonesville, but if he planned to continue dealing with the bad elements corroding his neighborhood, he was going to have to replenish his supplies, no two ways about it. Only God could say what he might find when he reached Fayetteville, but there was no other option.
He decided to do it during daylight hours. He needed to rest before attempting the journey. The night before the trip to Fayetteville, he slept as he always did, sitting with his back against the wall, a shotgun across his lap. He was in the dozing stage when the sound of something scuffling around in the kitchen snapped him awake.
The son of a bitches were in his house again.
It bothered him to know the dead things were inside his house, invading his personal space. It was bad enough they had to move into his neighborhood, worse still that they dared to trespass on his property, but this . . . actually invading his home . . . was the ultimate sin.
He listened at his bedroom door for a moment, trying to gauge as much information about the intruders as possible. He wasn't about to let them catch him by surprise. He judged by the scuffling and scraping noises that there were at least two, maybe more, of the walking dead outside the bedroom door.
The electricity had gone out some time ago. He grabbed a flashlight off his dresser, which would do him no good. He needed both hands for the shotgun. He'd made the mistake once of trying to fire it with one hand, and it had knocked him flat on his ass. Nearly cost him his life too. While he'd tried to regain his senses, a zombie had almost made a meal of him.
He stuck the flashlight in his back pocket, turned the doorknob, and slowly pulled the bedroom door open, cringing as it squeaked on its hinges. Surely the shambling intruders had heard that.