More Zombie Goodness

The funny thing is, I don't usually write about zombies much if ever. Yet here I am posting another short(er) tale of the walking undead. In this case, it came about as part of the "Kill Jack Haringa in Your Blog" movement, a short-lived but energetic artistic credo whose principle article of faith was to have notorious horror-critic and grammar-maven Jack Haringa eaten by zombie children.In part, I'm posting this because it and various of Jack's other demises were reprinted in Jack Haringa Must Die, a chapbbook whose purpose was to raise funds for the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which I am a judge. If you like this piece, think about buying the chapbook to support the award.The other reason I have for posting this is that I have a much, much longer original story in John Adams's massive new zombie anthology, The Living Dead. I describe it as Thorton Wilder's Our Town with Zombies. If you take a look at John's website for the book, you can read an excerpt from my story, "How the Day Runs Down," an interview with me, and lots of other cool stuff.Now--

Kids

These were not his students. For one thing, he'd never taught kids this young: the oldest couldn't be more than six or seven, and the majority of the group crowding through his classroom door looked nearer four or five. For another thing, these children were beyond dirty, they were filthy: hair matted, skin thick with dirt, clothes a motley of stains. Not to mention the smell they brought with them: the pungence of garbage bags heaped high on the sidealks outside cheap restaurants. For a moment, he was possessed by the conviction, by the absolute certainty, that he had stepped into a novel--Oliver Twist, perhaps, the Artful Dodger and his crew come calling, or possibly Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the denizens of Crane's Manhattan paying a visit--which his mind quickly corrected: I haven't stepped into the novel; the novel's stepped into me. The sensation gave him an odd vertigo; he reached out a hand to his desk to steady himself. Behind the six or seven year old, the children shuffled into the room en masse. Finding his voice, he said, "Can I help you?" and was surprised to hear the quaver in his words.The children stopped where they were, the expressions on their faces those of small animals suddenly discovered by a predator. The possibility that this was some kind of strange joke, one of the seniors playing freak-out the hardass English teacher, flashed through his mind, only to be rejected as paranoia. Anyway, there was too much about the scene in front of him that didn't make joke-sense. It wasn't as if he were teaching Dickens right now--as if he ever taught Dickens, or Crane, for that matter. That he could recall, he'd never made mention of any phobias involving groups of small, dirty children, either. He stepped around the desk, closer to the kids. "Are you guys okay?" The children's eyes tracked him as he drew closer to them, bent over slightly as he said, "Are you lost? Were you on your way someplace?" Maybe a student organization was doing something with kids from one of the more run-down sections of Worcester, having them to lunch or something. Although, Jesus, if that were the case, you'd think the kids' parents could've done a little more to clean them up. Not that they had to be wearing dresses and suits, but still. He looked at the children's eyes looking at him. How dark they all were, that dark brown that can seem indistinguishable from black. Strange to find a group of kids this size all with the exact same eye color. "Tell you what: why don't you come with me, and we'll see if we can't find out where you're supposed to be." He started to walk past them, towards the door.He didn't see which one tripped him, was on the floor so quickly that it took a moment for his brain to register what had happened. "What..." He was all right, but he'd come this far away from braining himself on one of the students' desks. Probably an accident. "Hey," he said as he went to turn over.The pain in his calf was sharp and burning. He shouted and swung his hand back without thinking. It connected with a child's head with a loud smack, rolled the kid off and away from him. Shouldn't have done that, he thought as he tried to stand. But OW, the little punk bit me, look at that, he bit right through the leg of my pants. It was true: the brown fabric was torn, along with the skin beneath. Blood was literally running out of the wound, tickling down his leg, damping his sock. What the hell? "All right," he said.He wasn't all the way to his feet when the children broke over him. This time his head did connect with the corner of a desk. There was a flare of white light and then a gap, a moment when the the world went far away. It returned on a wave of pain. His legs, his arms, his side--all on fire with, with...Oh Christ, they're biting me! Good Lord, the little--they're biting me!They were. Looking at their mouths smeared with red, you might have thought they were playing at clowns, applying their mothers' lipstick with childrens' enthusiastic spasms. But one of them was licking her lips; another was chewing, for the love of God; a third was jerking his head back the way you do when you're trying to alley-oop a piece of food from your lip into your mouth. They were eating him. He could feel their teeth ripping pieces of him away. He tried to flail his arms, kick his legs, roll one way or the other, but they had him pinned to the classroom floor. His shirt, pants--what hadn't been torn away--were sticking to him with his own blood. He tried to raise his head, to see what was being done to him, but all he could make out were small heads whose thick hair was slick with blood, with his blood. They pushed and shoved each other, jostling for the best places at the dinner table he had become.No sound, he thought as consciousness spiralled down the drainpipe. They weren't talking, laughing, crying, making any of the sounds a group of children might make. There was only the noise of eating, flesh tearing, teeth clicking, lips smacking together.