The Living Dead 2

Category Five by Marc Paoletti

Marc Paoletti is the coauthor (with Patricia Rosemoor) of the novels The Last Vampire and The Vampire Agent. He is also the author of Scorch, a thriller that draws upon his experiences as a Hollywood pyrotechnician. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Young Blood, Book of Voices, Horror Library Vol. 2, The Best Underground Fiction, The Blackest Death Vol. 2, Cold Flesh, and Thou Shalt Not. Earlier this year, he had a story published in First Thrills, edited by Lee Child.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Almost 2,000 people died, both in the storm itself and in the severe flooding that followed. And bad as the storm was, the real horror was the human element-the engineers’ failure to maintain the levees, the incompetence of the federal response, and the disorder that ensued. People attempting to flee the storm-ravaged city of New Orleans were turned back at gunpoint by locals who feared looters. FEMA director Michael Brown, a political appointee whose most relevant prior experience had been managing horse shows, became a laughingstock after the president absurdly praised him for doing a “heck of a job.”

Most of us never imagined we’d see corpses lying unattended on the streets of an American city. The author of our next story writes, “I watched Hurricane Katrina decimate New Orleans live on CNN. Talk about horror. I was shocked by the devastation, and appalled that the most disadvantaged people were bearing the brunt of the disaster. I finished the first draft of this story in one sitting. Funny what happens when you’re fueled by outrage. Also my childhood home in Sacramento was almost flooded a few years back. I was in Los Angeles at the time. Believe me, it’s grim to get a call from your folks in the middle of the night and hear the fear in their voices as they tell you the levee-which is less than a mile away from them-is about to break.”

Remy listened to the wind beat the walls, listened to the rain whip the windows. Since the power was out and it was after sundown, he’d lit candles in the bedroom and rest of the house. He might have considered the thrashing beat a hip tempo if not for what he’d heard over the battery-powered radio crackling on the dresser.

Category five.

This hurricane was supposed to be the worst in a generation, like nothing they’d seen, yet the mayor had done little to get folks like him and Marta out. They were late seventies. Too poor to afford a car. Too old to venture far on their own. They were black. They didn’t matter.

Their home was ramshackle, single story, built long ago in a crumbling ward that sat below sea level and lacked the comfort of close neighbors. On the radio, he’d heard that the 17th Street Canal levee was under assault by storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. If the levee failed, the ward didn’t stand a chance. Their home didn’t stand a chance.

He sat next to Marta who lay under thick covers, eyes closed, breathing fitfully. He placed a wrinkled palm on the wrinkled forehead of his love, her sweaty skin the color of coffee and sooty with age, but still beautiful to him after fifty years of marriage.

Remy touched her as he listened to the radio’s thick crackles, to the broken bits of news, to the random chatter. Other wards had been flooded, he’d made out that much. The water had carried away cars and trucks, had swept houses from their foundations, and had caved in crypts and mortuaries freeing the bodies within.

That’s where things got strange.

He thought he’d heard reports that said disinterred bodies were coming back to life. Witnesses on the radio had sworn it was true. Supposedly, dead bodies had writhed and flailed as floodwaters swept them along and when they’d washed against higher ground, they’d clambered to their feet and walked. Walked. He shook his head. Here people were spinning foolish tales about the walking dead when Marta couldn’t walk at all.

“We’ll get through this, you ’n’ me,” Remy whispered, taking his wife’s hand. “Like we got through so much else.”

She moaned softly. Marta had been sick for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that he’d nearly forgotten what their life had been like before the disease. Ovarian cancer. It didn’t make sense to him since she was far past childbearing age-not that they’d had children-but her ovaries had become polluted just the same, and the cancer had spread to her stomach and then her spine.

“We’ll get through this, hon,” he repeated, but didn’t know how to make good on the promise if the levee broke. How could he when most of the city had run off? When the police and fire fighters had run off as well?

Lightning flashed, casting the room bright white, and then thunder growled as fiercely as the apocalypse.

Taking the radio, Remy shuffled down a dark hallway into a kitchen lit by candles. He fetched more matches from a cupboard, and then counted cans. They had enough food for a week, which would have been fine if the morphine he’d dripped so carefully onto Marta’s tongue with a baby’s eyedropper hadn’t run out that very morning. He couldn’t call the hospital for more, either, because the landline was dead and he’d never been able to afford a cell phone. Of course that was assuming the hospital staff hadn’t left town, which they probably had.

Without morphine, Marta had nowhere to hide from the pain; already it was becoming too much for her. One moment she’d be lying there peacefully, and the next she’d be mewling and balling her fists and crushing her eyes closed with such force that he’d feel her agony like it was his own.

Mewling… that was the only sound she could make now.

Remy looked into the living room at his trumpet, which hung on the wall in a glass case above the fireplace. He’d put it away over a year ago when Marta got so sick she couldn’t sing along with him any more.

At times he’d fooled himself into believing that folks had come to the Bourbon Street clubs they booked to hear his sharp-noted riffs, but deep down, he’d always known they’d come for her. Achingly hourglass in form-fitting blue, Marta would take the stage as quietly as an afterthought, press her full lips to the mic, and then float her voice sweetly, robustly, through a room’s smoky air in time with his trumpet’s plaintive moan. Jazz, blues, gospel, rock-she could sing them all. Transform them all. Her soulful, smooth-rasping lullabies never failed to transfix, to shake free what was hidden, to soothe like promises of hope the damaged spirits of those who listened. None more than his. None more.

No more.

Marta’s voice had been siphoned by the cancer. What he would do to give Marta her voice back. To stop her constant suffering.

The radio crackled. Remy placed it on the kitchen counter and fussed with the dial.

“…broken…” he heard the broadcaster say. “…17th Street Canal levee…mercy on our souls…”

Remy went cold with fear. So it had happened. He had to get Marta outside and up onto the roof, but how could he when he lacked the strength to move her fast enough to beat the coming floodwater?

Suddenly, an idea occurred to him. He dashed to the utility closet, whipped out his raingear: an opaque-plastic poncho to cover his tweed jacket, shabby white shirt, and gray slacks, and galoshes to cover his cracked Oxfords. And then, as he grabbed a shovel, he heard it.

A deep and distant roar that swelled like the charging thrum of a thousand battle tanks-a sound he’d last heard as a young man in the killing fields of Korea-until it shook the floor, the walls, the house. The glass case surrounding his trumpet shuddered then cracked down the middle as plaster dust fell in streaks from the ceiling. The roar-nature’s own terrible riff-grew so thick that he thought he might feel it slide against his fingers, and then came a cracking, trembling boom followed by a mad-static hiss.

The house groaned and held. But for how long?

Lightning flashed, giving him a glimpse of the flood through the living room window. A dark wave tumbled past, followed by another and another. Grimy water flowed underneath the front door, soaking fast across the carpet, as the flood level surged against the sill.

And then he saw something else.

At first he thought it was debris held in place by opposing currents, but then he realized it was the naked corpse of a man-one washed from a cemetery and long dead, judging by the decay. The flesh was shriveled and fish-belly white, the eyes were worm-eaten, and the jaw, a skinless mandible, opened and closed like the corpse was trying to describe the destruction it had witnessed. Open and closed. Open and closed. The jaw opened and closed so much it made him think for a moment that stories of the dead coming back to life might be true.

Remy chided himself for entertaining the silly idea when the corpse lashed out and grabbed the window frame. He could only stare in disbelief as the thing pulled itself toward him through the roaring deluge, and then slammed its rotted face into the glass. The window shattered and let in a thick rush of black, foul-smelling floodwater.

Remy threw up his arms to protect his face from the glass as the thing clutched both sides of the window frame and stepped a twisted, rotted foot onto the flooding carpet.

He continued to stare in shock, not wanting to believe what he saw but unable to deny the truth before him. Alive! Alive! The radio was right!

When the thing brought its other leg through the window and then reached for him, Remy snapped out of his fugue and swung the shovel. The flat of the blade struck the thing’s chest with a wet-sack slap, pushing it back. But then it kept coming, growl bubbling in its throat, like it hadn’t felt any pain at all.

He swung again, striking the thing’s face this time, and the rotted skull imploded in a gush of pink. The headless body took a final step before it collapsed splashing into the water, which was high enough now to soak Remy’s pants above the galoshes.

Still clutching the shovel, Remy bolted from the flooding living room. It wouldn’t be long before the water flowed down the hall and reached the bedroom.

That thing was alive!

Mind still reeling, he slammed the bedroom door closed and then wedged clothes underneath it. That would hold back the floodwater for only a minute or two, but it was something, at least.

Holding the shovel under one arm, he dragged the dresser to the middle of the floor then clambered on top of it and stood as straight as he could without hitting the low ceiling.

“I’ll be right back, hon,” Remy said, trying to keep the panic from his voice. “Just wait there as best you can.” Marta mewled, gripped the blankets. The morphine was wearing off, and he felt her growing agony in his chest, in his heart.

Age had taken a toll on him, but he knew it had taken more of a toll on the cracked, off-grade ceiling. He jabbed the shovel up again and again, shattering thin plaster, rending pink insulation, splintering worm-eaten beams. Finally, he broke through brittle shingles and saw the night sky. Raindrops pelted his face as he wormed up through the ragged hole and then stood on the roof near a small brick chimney, wind whipping his poncho.

By light of the moon, he saw that the water had taken the entire neighborhood, uprooting trees, rolling cars, flooding houses, creating a trash-strewn sea in every direction. He and Marta could expect to be stranded for a long time. Too long. And then he noticed flailing silhouettes flowing among the houses when lightning revealed what the moon hadn’t-dozens of animated dead, like the one that had broken through his window, caught in the rushing floodwater. Rotted bodies, broken bodies, bodies with limbs missing, bodies stripped of flesh. Some floated and thrashed while others strode through the chest-deep water, straining to escape the vicious current. Over the din of rushing water came a flat, plaintive sound. Moaning, he realized. A wailing chorus from the dead that rose up with a life of its own.

Remy closed his eyes and considered his only choice.

God willing, he’d have the strength to hoist Marta through the hole and onto the roof, and then he’d do his best to cover her with his poncho to keep her dry and hide her from the dead things that surrounded them. But they’d still be stranded. And Marta would still be without her morphine.

Below, Marta cried out in agony. Desperation shot through him. What else could he do?

He scrambled around the roof, looking for a safe way off, but the water was everywhere, rushing past in black, white-capped fury. He scanned the surface for debris, for a bobbing chunk big enough to use as a raft, but again there was only black water. Black water and the thrashing, floating bodies of the animated dead.

Marta cried out again, voice tinged with such pain, such agony, that Remy moaned in frustration and blind emptiness as rage blossomed along with his fear. He beat the chimney until his knuckles were bloody, crying out himself, his own anguish mingling with Marta’s cries and the moans rising up from the dark water around him.

And then he felt a sudden calm come over him. There was another way out of this. Another way. For a moment he felt a flicker of doubt, but another cry from Marta decided the issue.

The animated dead moved with ease and felt no pain. That much had been clear from the thing in his living room. As unbelievable as it seemed, he could not doubt what he had witnessed or question the opportunity that had been placed before him.

He wondered about Marta’s voice as he lowered himself back through the hole in the roof and onto the dresser. Would it return when her pain disappeared? He listened to the moans coming through the wall as clear as a back-up chorus. Maybe the dead could do more than moan. Was that so hard to believe in the face of all this? Maybe the dead outside chose to moan their woe, chose to moan in eulogy for the living who no longer grieved for them.

But such would not be the case with Marta and him. They would choose to do otherwise. They had each other. They’d always have each other.

Remy clambered down from the dresser, rushed to Marta’s side, and leaned over to kiss her forehead. She opened her pain-stricken eyes.

“Do you trust me?” he whispered.

She blinked her eyes once slowly in reply. Always.

Nodding, he turned and opened the bedroom door.

The floodwater rushed in to soak the tops of his galoshes, then chilled his calves, then his knees. The cold water kept rising as he sloshed back to the bed, sat by Marta’s side, and stroked her forehead.

It had to be something in the water that brought the dead back. It had to be.

“Close your eyes, hon,” he said.

But she didn’t close her eyes. He knew she could sense his doubt. His fear. In fifty years, he could never keep a secret from her.

She might have known what was about to happen, too, because she reached out, gently pulled his face to hers, pressed her lips to his ear. And began to sing. For the first time in so, so long.

Her raspy, pain-etched voice scraped only the bottom of the notes she used to reach, but it soothed his spirit just the same, long enough and completely enough until the floodwater delivered them into their new beginning.