The Graveyard: A Tale from the Zombie Files
by Andy Weeks
Copyright (c) 2012
I shouldn’t have gone to the graveyard.
That was my second mistake.
My first was watching Zombie Files.
My parents had gone away for the weekend, and I was at home alone watching a B-rated horror movie my dad bought at a garage sale. It wasn’t Night of the Living Dead, but it was similar to George Romero’s classic zombie flick. In Zombie Files, the dead had risen from the grave -- not by an alien disease but by a shaman’s curse -- and sought to eat human flesh. The evil spread, and by the end of the movie the whole Midwestern town had turned into one big zombie resort.
Stupid, I know. But I’ve always been a sucker for horror movies, especially the low-budget films, the ones that never make it to the theaters -- or at least don’t make it big at the box office. I guess I got it from my dad, who’s also a horror fan. That’s why he bought the low-budget film, probably produced by an independent filmmaker in the 1970s. It looked ‘70s-ish, but the DVD case it came in was rather bland looking and didn’t even include a copyright date. Oh well, it was a fun-enough movie.
I like horror books, too, and have inherited collections on the big-name authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul, as well as the lesser-known names such as Scott Nicholson, Nate Kenyon and Brian Keene. Keene, with his zombie series, is the George Romero of novels. That’s what my dad says. I especially liked Ghoul, and its flashback to the ‘80s. I guess I got that from my dad too. My parents were teenagers in the 1980s and I’ve heard a lot about the era from them, so I especially enjoyed Ghoul when I read it just last year -- the year Michael Jackson had died. He was big in the ‘80s, my dad said. “Biggest thing since white bread,” he’d joked when the headlines screamed the King of Pop’s death. The comment was rather humorous, since Michael Jackson was -- at least at one time -- black. I’ve seen pictures of him. He didn’t always look like the mannequin-like
(zombie-like?)
figure he appeared to be in his later years.
At seventeen, maybe I was born out of time, because I’m more inclined to former days than the present. But that’s a discussion for another time, as is the discussion about the power of horror. Suffice it to say that when friends would ask why I’m inclined to read horror books and watch horror movies, I’d tell them it was the only genre that touched the emotions so deeply -- fear, love, hate, hope. When they didn’t get it, which usually they didn’t, I’d tell them they’d have to experience it themselves to understand it.
My dad didn’t teach me that. I learned that all on my own -- by experiencing it.
That doesn’t mean I’d willingly step foot in a graveyard at night -- alone.
But that’s what I did.
I went to the graveyard after the movie had ended. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t answer the question. Except to say, well, I was drawn there.
The way I look at it, I didn’t really have a choice, not after watching the movie.
As I sat watching the movie credits scroll by, something clicked in my mind, almost like an alarm clock in my head, waking me to my duties. The movie had wielded some kind of power over me.
I’m not sad. Not really. It’s just that, well … sometimes I miss the old days. The way things were before the world had changed. The way things were before I watched Zombie Files.
I don’t remember walking to the graveyard, only that I had arrived.
It was a clear, crisp night in October. The day before Halloween ...
II
I opened the wrought-iron gate and walked in, not bothering to close it behind me.
The moon painted the cemetery in an odd, gray ambience, which made the dark silhouettes of the thick elm trees stand out like decrepit soldiers guarding the dead. A light breeze tickled my skin, making goose pimples march up my arms and neck. The trees’ dying leaves, most already carpeting the ground, chimed against each other. A sound much like a woman crying emanated from the corners of the sharp-edged tombstones, some standing four-feet or higher, and the eaves of the crematorium as the wind prowled around the cement structure. More goose pimples formed on my skin like dour faces once buried in sand, now emerging from their own graves to once again breathe new life.
The simile was not lost on me, and I wondered if the dead really could come back to life. And, I wondered, what power could make such a thing happen? Could it be the curse of an angry shaman, such as depicted in Zombie Files? How about a virus, like authors create in their books? Could it be transmitted through the water, in food, or through cell phones? But why would it be a virus? A virus makes one ill, not recovers one to life. Even if it was a decrepit life.
I didn’t know, doubted anyone really knew. After all, the dead rising from their graves -- no matter how cool it seemed in books and movies -- was just that, fiction.
Or was it?
Isn’t that what Jesus was supposed to have done -- rose from the grave three days after his crucifixion? The resurrection. But Christ wasn’t resurrected as a zombie.
Zombies weren’t real.
Then I saw something that would change my opinion and, with it, my whole world.
III
The ground beneath my feet bubbled and crawled, as if a giant gofer were trying to dig its way out. I lost my balance and fell backward, landing on my butt. I felt more than heard the smack of my head against a headstone, and my world became dizzy and then began to fade.
But before I gave in to the darkness, I saw other mounds rising, bubbling -- vulcanizing -- from the decrepit lawn. I saw a hand rise up out of the ground before me, grasping for the air that all of a sudden seemed humid and rank. Then I saw other hands once buried reach for the sky. I reached for my nose instead of my head, but I don’t know if my hand ever made it to its mark before I blacked out.
IV
When I came to I felt cold and clammy. My head hurt severely, but I tried to sit up. A wave of nausea hit me, and I sank back to my knees. Then I retched. And retched some more. I shivered afterward, both because I was cold and in pain.
I also wasn’t alone.
I sat up, looked around -- and jumped at what I saw.
A horde of zombies who’d crawled from their graves stood before me, their dead faces etched with rotting flesh, skeletal smiles, maggot-ridden eyes, and swollen, half-eaten tongues. The stench of the dead bodies was horrific, and I felt like I was going to retch again. But there was nothing left, and all I did was dry heave.
I tried to get my legs in motion, to run away from the motley crew that stood with queer interest at me -- a living, human being -- but I felt paralyzed with fear and couldn’t move.
Then something crashed behind me, making me jump and pulling me out of my frigidity. I turned around. A branch from one of the graveyard’s large oak trees had snapped, falling to the ground.
And with it, a zombie.
The living-dead thing wrestled with the branch, which must have weighed a good hundred pounds or more, then lifted it off and tossed it aside as easy as throwing a blanket into the wash.
I looked up and saw another zombie on another branch of the same tree. I looked to the other trees, and saw more zombies, their silhouettes becoming appendages of the leafless oak branches.
I didn’t stay around to see more. I heard footsteps behind me and, without looking back, knew the zombies were drawing closer.
I took off running toward the exit, but the graveyard was covered with holes and mountains of dirt from the open graves. Headstones were knocked over, some of them broken in pieces. Unlike what is depicted in the entertainment media, the zombies weren’t slow. They were, in fact, fairly quick, even agile. After all, they could climb trees.
Still, I was faster.
A full moon, by whose light I was able to make out the night’s zombie scene, helped me find my way around the graveyard. The few gray headstones that still stood upright looked like miniature sentinels guarding the now-desecrated ground. I maneuvered around one, jumped another -- and landed in an open grave. I had twisted my ankle in the fall and as I stood up to climb out of the death pit, a zombie landed on me.
Then another.
And another.
V
When I came to, I was alone in the open grave. Lying on my back, I starred up at the night sky, which seemed darker than it had earlier. The moon had moved westward and a million stars shimmered against the black backdrop of an alien world. One of the stars shot across the sky. I made a wish and laid there for several more minutes, listening to the stark quiet that had befallen the graveyard. Like the moon, the zombies had moved on.
Or had they?
I rose, and then stumbled when I put pressure on my ankle. I forgot that I had injured it earlier. Putting most of my weight on the other foot, I stood and reached for the ground above and pulled myself up. The graveyard was still a shambles. It looked as if grenades -- perhaps bunker-buster missiles, the kind used to kill cave-hiding Taliban -- had tore open the deadscape of the once-hallowed ground.
I crawled out of the grave. What had happened to the zombies? I wondered. I would’ve been inclined to believe I had dreamed the whole thing if not for the wreckage that lay before me.
No matter. Whatever had happened, whatever hell had descended -- or ascended -- from the netherworlds, I was alive. It was time to move on. It was time to go home.
And when I got there, I’d throw Zombie Files in the trash.
Then I saw something that at first revolted me, made my stomach quiver. At my feet was a grossly mangled and dirty arm from one of the zombies. Half the hand’s fingers were gone, and a jagged piece of bone jutted from the ragged, maggoty flesh.
At first I didn’t know why, but my revulsion didn’t last long. I realized next that I was near famished with hunger. Oddly, I felt as if my hunger would never be satiated, that it’d stay with me even when I got my fill.
Then I knew. But the tears never came.
I picked up the decrepit arm, rank with death smell, and began to chew.
That was my second mistake.
My first was watching Zombie Files.
My parents had gone away for the weekend, and I was at home alone watching a B-rated horror movie my dad bought at a garage sale. It wasn’t Night of the Living Dead, but it was similar to George Romero’s classic zombie flick. In Zombie Files, the dead had risen from the grave -- not by an alien disease but by a shaman’s curse -- and sought to eat human flesh. The evil spread, and by the end of the movie the whole Midwestern town had turned into one big zombie resort.
Stupid, I know. But I’ve always been a sucker for horror movies, especially the low-budget films, the ones that never make it to the theaters -- or at least don’t make it big at the box office. I guess I got it from my dad, who’s also a horror fan. That’s why he bought the low-budget film, probably produced by an independent filmmaker in the 1970s. It looked ‘70s-ish, but the DVD case it came in was rather bland looking and didn’t even include a copyright date. Oh well, it was a fun-enough movie.
I like horror books, too, and have inherited collections on the big-name authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul, as well as the lesser-known names such as Scott Nicholson, Nate Kenyon and Brian Keene. Keene, with his zombie series, is the George Romero of novels. That’s what my dad says. I especially liked Ghoul, and its flashback to the ‘80s. I guess I got that from my dad too. My parents were teenagers in the 1980s and I’ve heard a lot about the era from them, so I especially enjoyed Ghoul when I read it just last year -- the year Michael Jackson had died. He was big in the ‘80s, my dad said. “Biggest thing since white bread,” he’d joked when the headlines screamed the King of Pop’s death. The comment was rather humorous, since Michael Jackson was -- at least at one time -- black. I’ve seen pictures of him. He didn’t always look like the mannequin-like
(zombie-like?)
figure he appeared to be in his later years.
At seventeen, maybe I was born out of time, because I’m more inclined to former days than the present. But that’s a discussion for another time, as is the discussion about the power of horror. Suffice it to say that when friends would ask why I’m inclined to read horror books and watch horror movies, I’d tell them it was the only genre that touched the emotions so deeply -- fear, love, hate, hope. When they didn’t get it, which usually they didn’t, I’d tell them they’d have to experience it themselves to understand it.
My dad didn’t teach me that. I learned that all on my own -- by experiencing it.
That doesn’t mean I’d willingly step foot in a graveyard at night -- alone.
But that’s what I did.
I went to the graveyard after the movie had ended. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t answer the question. Except to say, well, I was drawn there.
The way I look at it, I didn’t really have a choice, not after watching the movie.
As I sat watching the movie credits scroll by, something clicked in my mind, almost like an alarm clock in my head, waking me to my duties. The movie had wielded some kind of power over me.
I’m not sad. Not really. It’s just that, well … sometimes I miss the old days. The way things were before the world had changed. The way things were before I watched Zombie Files.
I don’t remember walking to the graveyard, only that I had arrived.
It was a clear, crisp night in October. The day before Halloween ...
II
I opened the wrought-iron gate and walked in, not bothering to close it behind me.
The moon painted the cemetery in an odd, gray ambience, which made the dark silhouettes of the thick elm trees stand out like decrepit soldiers guarding the dead. A light breeze tickled my skin, making goose pimples march up my arms and neck. The trees’ dying leaves, most already carpeting the ground, chimed against each other. A sound much like a woman crying emanated from the corners of the sharp-edged tombstones, some standing four-feet or higher, and the eaves of the crematorium as the wind prowled around the cement structure. More goose pimples formed on my skin like dour faces once buried in sand, now emerging from their own graves to once again breathe new life.
The simile was not lost on me, and I wondered if the dead really could come back to life. And, I wondered, what power could make such a thing happen? Could it be the curse of an angry shaman, such as depicted in Zombie Files? How about a virus, like authors create in their books? Could it be transmitted through the water, in food, or through cell phones? But why would it be a virus? A virus makes one ill, not recovers one to life. Even if it was a decrepit life.
I didn’t know, doubted anyone really knew. After all, the dead rising from their graves -- no matter how cool it seemed in books and movies -- was just that, fiction.
Or was it?
Isn’t that what Jesus was supposed to have done -- rose from the grave three days after his crucifixion? The resurrection. But Christ wasn’t resurrected as a zombie.
Zombies weren’t real.
Then I saw something that would change my opinion and, with it, my whole world.
III
The ground beneath my feet bubbled and crawled, as if a giant gofer were trying to dig its way out. I lost my balance and fell backward, landing on my butt. I felt more than heard the smack of my head against a headstone, and my world became dizzy and then began to fade.
But before I gave in to the darkness, I saw other mounds rising, bubbling -- vulcanizing -- from the decrepit lawn. I saw a hand rise up out of the ground before me, grasping for the air that all of a sudden seemed humid and rank. Then I saw other hands once buried reach for the sky. I reached for my nose instead of my head, but I don’t know if my hand ever made it to its mark before I blacked out.
IV
When I came to I felt cold and clammy. My head hurt severely, but I tried to sit up. A wave of nausea hit me, and I sank back to my knees. Then I retched. And retched some more. I shivered afterward, both because I was cold and in pain.
I also wasn’t alone.
I sat up, looked around -- and jumped at what I saw.
A horde of zombies who’d crawled from their graves stood before me, their dead faces etched with rotting flesh, skeletal smiles, maggot-ridden eyes, and swollen, half-eaten tongues. The stench of the dead bodies was horrific, and I felt like I was going to retch again. But there was nothing left, and all I did was dry heave.
I tried to get my legs in motion, to run away from the motley crew that stood with queer interest at me -- a living, human being -- but I felt paralyzed with fear and couldn’t move.
Then something crashed behind me, making me jump and pulling me out of my frigidity. I turned around. A branch from one of the graveyard’s large oak trees had snapped, falling to the ground.
And with it, a zombie.
The living-dead thing wrestled with the branch, which must have weighed a good hundred pounds or more, then lifted it off and tossed it aside as easy as throwing a blanket into the wash.
I looked up and saw another zombie on another branch of the same tree. I looked to the other trees, and saw more zombies, their silhouettes becoming appendages of the leafless oak branches.
I didn’t stay around to see more. I heard footsteps behind me and, without looking back, knew the zombies were drawing closer.
I took off running toward the exit, but the graveyard was covered with holes and mountains of dirt from the open graves. Headstones were knocked over, some of them broken in pieces. Unlike what is depicted in the entertainment media, the zombies weren’t slow. They were, in fact, fairly quick, even agile. After all, they could climb trees.
Still, I was faster.
A full moon, by whose light I was able to make out the night’s zombie scene, helped me find my way around the graveyard. The few gray headstones that still stood upright looked like miniature sentinels guarding the now-desecrated ground. I maneuvered around one, jumped another -- and landed in an open grave. I had twisted my ankle in the fall and as I stood up to climb out of the death pit, a zombie landed on me.
Then another.
And another.
V
When I came to, I was alone in the open grave. Lying on my back, I starred up at the night sky, which seemed darker than it had earlier. The moon had moved westward and a million stars shimmered against the black backdrop of an alien world. One of the stars shot across the sky. I made a wish and laid there for several more minutes, listening to the stark quiet that had befallen the graveyard. Like the moon, the zombies had moved on.
Or had they?
I rose, and then stumbled when I put pressure on my ankle. I forgot that I had injured it earlier. Putting most of my weight on the other foot, I stood and reached for the ground above and pulled myself up. The graveyard was still a shambles. It looked as if grenades -- perhaps bunker-buster missiles, the kind used to kill cave-hiding Taliban -- had tore open the deadscape of the once-hallowed ground.
I crawled out of the grave. What had happened to the zombies? I wondered. I would’ve been inclined to believe I had dreamed the whole thing if not for the wreckage that lay before me.
No matter. Whatever had happened, whatever hell had descended -- or ascended -- from the netherworlds, I was alive. It was time to move on. It was time to go home.
And when I got there, I’d throw Zombie Files in the trash.
Then I saw something that at first revolted me, made my stomach quiver. At my feet was a grossly mangled and dirty arm from one of the zombies. Half the hand’s fingers were gone, and a jagged piece of bone jutted from the ragged, maggoty flesh.
At first I didn’t know why, but my revulsion didn’t last long. I realized next that I was near famished with hunger. Oddly, I felt as if my hunger would never be satiated, that it’d stay with me even when I got my fill.
Then I knew. But the tears never came.
I picked up the decrepit arm, rank with death smell, and began to chew.