Nights of the Living Dead Read online

  Of those, Dead of Night and Fall of Night are directly connected to Night of the Living Dead. I wrote them for George. They’re dedicated to him and written because of my love of his movies and his creative vision.

  When I cooked up the idea for this anthology and reached out to him, George was immediately receptive and enthused. Having that first conversation was, I admit, a fanboy moment. Luckily I have a pretty well-controlled telephone voice, because in reality I was doing the Snoopy dance. Think about it; the ten-year-old kid who snuck into the movies to see Night of the Living Dead was now an adult and a successful writer of weird fiction, and I was talking to Romero about a project we could do together.

  So damn much fun.

  During that conversation we talked about Dead of Night and George invited me to write a short story for our anthology that officially connects my books to his movie. That story, “Lone Gunman,” appears herein. It was an exceptionally satisfying thing to write.

  When we were done with our conversation I sent some e-mails and made some calls to see if some of the writers who were at the top of their game these days—and who had particular connections with zombie literature—wanted to come aboard.

  I didn’t have to ask anyone twice.

  George and I gave them the “rules” of the living dead, but we did not impose too strict a set of guidelines. Dates, for example, are sketchy. Night was released in 1968, but George’s movie Diary of the Dead, released in 2007, technically takes place at the same time. So, let’s all assume that this happens tomorrow night. Whenever that is.

  We also allowed for a little creative freedom in other areas, but you’ll see how that plays out. After all, George messed with his own “rules” in each of his films, suggesting that the nature of this catastrophe was misunderstood, misreported, subject to disinformation from authorities, and very likely undergoing a constant process of change.

  The stories in Nights of the Living Dead are all original and published here for the first time. They’re fun, scary, sad, hilarious, moving, thoughtful, weird, and disturbing. Pretty much what you’d expect for stories set in the world George Romero and John Russo created nearly fifty years ago.

  If you’re like me—a longtime fan of the genre—or a newbie, or if you followed one of your favorite writers here to see what all the fuss is about, then welcome to the apocalypse.

  It’s about to get weird in here.

  —JONATHAN MABERRY

  DEAD MAN’S CURVE

  by Joe R. Lansdale

  I can’t build them and I can’t fix them. That’s what my brother Tommy does, and he does it well. He could make a lawn mower outrun a flathead Ford, but if I’m short in the mechanic department, I sure can drive them. No brag, just fact.

  That’s what Tommy was trying to explain to Matt.

  “She may be a girl,” Tommy said, “but she can drive.”

  “May be a girl?” I said. “What the hell is that?”

  “You know what I mean,” Tommy said, glancing back at me.

  I knew what he meant all right.

  Matt leaned on the hood of his Pontiac GTO and studied me, his hands thrust into his blue jean pockets. I thought he was taking a bit long for the evaluation. His friend Duane stood nearby. He looked amused.

  “She looks all right, and she’ll make someone a good wife, but drive?” he said.

  “Goddamn you,” I said.

  “Okay,” Matt said, “she might not make someone a good wife either.”

  “You scared a girl will beat you?” I said.

  Duane snickered. Matt didn’t say anything, but even in the dying light, I could tell he didn’t like that. Duane wasn’t quite the asshole Matt was, but my rule of thumb is simple. You’re an asshole until you prove otherwise. It’s just that right then I took Matt to be the bigger asshole of the two.

  Matt studied me again. Now I was doing the leaning, my blue-jeaned butt against the apple-red Dodge Charger. I cocked a foot against the bumper so that my knee was up high, in what I thought was a cool-looking position. I stuck a finger into the pocket of my blue jeans like I might have money in it. And I did.

  I gave Matt what I thought was my movie star smile and tried to look as smug as a duck with a june bug. The Charger I was leaning on was Tommy’s, being bought and paid for by part-time work. It might as well have been mine. It liked me best. Tommy drove it, shifted gears, it sounded like someone was trying to beat a cat to death with a logging chain, but when I drove it, it purred like a tiger cub and ran like a cheetah with its ass on fire.

  “Are all the girls from Texas like this one?” Matt said.

  “Well, they got their similarities,” Tommy said, “but Janey is a little bit special.”

  “You Yankees afraid I might blow your asses in the trees?” I said.

  Matt turned and looked down the road. The sun was dropping down at the end of it, seeming to melt into the earth like a heated snow cone. It looked like a northern sun to me, not a Texas one. The one in Texas was a whole hell of a lot brighter and warmer. The air here, even on the edge of summer, was nippy.

  “All right,” Matt said. “She can race me.”

  “Why thank you, Mister Matt,” I said. “You’re quite the sport.”

  “Don’t push it,” Matt said.

  “You don’t race me, who else you going to race?” I said. “No one else is here.”

  “I thought I was going to take money from Tommy, not some cute girl who likes to hang on to a stick shift.”

  “Oh, you’ll never know what I like to hang on to, Matthew,” I said.

  He gave me a sour look.

  “What I got is this,” and I reached in my jean pocket and pulled out a wad of bills that would have choked a horse and made its stablemate cough.

  “This here, Matthew, is two hundred dollars. You ever ran for two hundred dollars?”

  “I’ve ran for more than twice that much. And I won.”

  “Then you can sure run for two hundred.”

  “Hate to take your makeup money, baby.”

  “Just show your dough,” I said.

  Matt turned to Duane, said, “Hey, I’m short about a hundred and forty.”

  “Damn,” Duane said. “Might as well ask for the whole enchilada.”

  “Come on, man. Help me out.”

  Duane removed his billfold from his hip pocket and peeled some bills out of it with all the enthusiasm of a man removing layers of skin from his forehead with a pair of tweezers.

  “You lose, you owe me double,” Duane said, and gave it to him.

  “Man,” Matt said, “double?”

  “You’re the one so all-fired certain,” Duane said.

  “All right,” Matt said. “All right. Let’s fire ’em up. See who makes those hard left turns.”

  “What hard left turns?” Tommy asked.

  “Couple of them,” Duane said.

  “First one, it’s not so bad,” Matt said, “but then the road gets so narrow another coat of paint and you’re rubbing the bark off the trees. Got a ways to go then, but there’s another curve, down by the old quarry. Dead Man’s Curve. Take that one too quick you’ll find yourself airborne, sailing over the rim. Drop don’t kill you, you drown.”

  “It’s like a lake,” Duane said.

  “After that, if you make that curve, because I know I will, we’ll end it at the hospital parking lot,” Matt said.

  “Hospital?” Tommy said.

  “What are you, a fucking parrot?” Matt said. “Yeah, the hospital. Just beyond it is the city morgue. We can end it there if you prefer.”

  “Hospital is fine,” Tommy said.

  “Bunch of dead old folks in the morgue right now,” Duane said, “some kind of convention, they all got sick at the hotel. Bet twenty of them died. Hospital has a bunch of sick ones packed in, some in bad shape, probably buying a ticket for the morgue right now.”

  “Read about it,” I said. “Some kind of mold in the ventilation system, I think.”

 
; “Who knows?” Duane said. “All that’s certain is that stuff is killing them and packing them in the dead house.”

  “Let’s talk about racing,” Matt said. “That’s what we’re here for.”

  “Cops?” Tommy said.

  “No worries there,” Matt said. “Law rarely comes out here.”

  “What if you’re wrong, and they’re sitting around the corner?” I said.

  “Well, girly, we get a ticket. You up for it, or are you just going to stand there trying to look good?”

  “Oh, Matt, honey,” I said, “I have no need to try.”

  * * *

  As I settled in behind the wheel, and Tommy sat beside me, I had a small faint feeling that I might have mouthed myself out of some money. I had enough confidence to loan some of it out, but I was uncertain about those sharp curves. If I had driven them once before, that would be different. But when we agreed to meet Matt and Duane on the road, we didn’t know the route. That was a bit of a mistake, and it was too late now. Matt was revving his engine.

  “You sure about this?” Tommy said.

  I lied a little. “I was born sure.”

  “I was there,” Tommy said. “I don’t know how certain you were then.”

  “You were at Grandma’s house playing with building blocks or some such shit,” I said.

  “That’s true,” he said.

  He was the older sibling by three years, but most of the time it seemed the other way around.

  Matthew revved his engine some more, then pulled his Pontiac to the right side of the road. I was on the left, of course. We hadn’t seen a car yet, and we’d been there talking and wheedling about who drove against who for half an hour. I think Matt was afraid of me and wanted Tommy to be his opponent. I had a bit of a reputation.

  “You know he’s got more under the hood than came with it,” Tommy said.

  “So does this one,” I said.

  “But I don’t know if he’s got more or less.”

  “You wanted me to race him,” I said. “That’s how you find out who’s got more or less, who’s the best driver. Have I ever let you down?”

  “Twice.”

  “Blew a tire once, bad carburetor the time after. Tonight, everything under the hood is as fresh as a baby’s first fart.”

  “You know, half that money in your pocket is mine.”

  “The die is cast, brother mine. Grab your ass and grit your teeth.”

  Matt rolled down his window, and Tommy rolled down his.

  “What we do,” said Matt, “is I count to three, or you can do it, no matter, but count to three, and on three we go for it. And watch those curves. Something happens to you, we just go home and have a hot chocolate like it never happened.”

  “Quit talking, and start counting,” I said.

  “One,” said Matt, and when he got to three you could hear those motors roar, hear those tires scream for mercy. We both blew out of there like rockets to Mars.

  Let me tell you, there’s nothing like it. The car leaps, and then it grabs the road, and then it doesn’t feel like there is a road, just you and the machine floating on air.

  Glanced to my right, saw that Matt and I were neck and neck. He had his teeth clenched, his window still down. That was a mistake. It gathered up air that way, pushed it to the back insides of the car, lay there like a weight. Tommy knew that, and he had rolled up his window to streamline us.

  Let me tell you, that first curve came up fast, and we had to make it together, and the road, just as you made the curve, grew narrow, and then there was another problem.

  The road was full of people.

  There were at least twenty, men and women, and one of the men wasn’t wearing any drawers. He had it all flapping out. The rest wore hospital gowns. They stretched across the road in a thin line, seemed drunk the way they staggered, and that was all I could tell in that moment when they suddenly appeared, dipped in moonlight as pale as Communion wafers. Even the one black lady seemed pale.

  I fought the wheel and tried to avoid them, but they were straight across the road and there really wasn’t anywhere to go. On the left were trees, on the right was Matt’s car. I veered as far left as I could, and fortunately, two of them on the left wandered right, and I missed them, but I’m sure I made enough breeze to blow up their gowns. My car threw up gravel, a bit of forest dirt, and then I spun beyond them like a top, turned the wheel in the direction of the skid and righted myself onto the road again. In my rearview mirror I saw Matt hit a couple of them staggering in front of his car. It was a hard, loud smack. They went flying like Mighty Mouse.

  Matt was braking, and it made his car scream like a panther. It slid sideways, almost up to where we sat in the road, and then it stopped, rocking like it had palsy.

  Duane rushed out of the car on his side, started running toward the people lying in the road, the ones wandering about.

  “You okay?” he said.

  Me and Tommy were out of our car too, wandering back to Matt, who opened his door and jumped out, stumbled a little.

  “I didn’t see them,” he said. “They were just there.”

  That’s when the two lying in the road tried to get up. One of them, a woman, managed it, but stood with her head dangling to the side, like it was held there by a thin string. Something like that, that kind of injury, you don’t expect people to be walking around. The other, an old man, his legs smashed, pulled himself forward with his hands, his fingernails scratching along on the blacktop. His legs as useless as mop strands.

  The others closed around Duane, and then, as if he had been lowered into a pool of piranha, they swarmed him. They could move pretty fast when they wanted to. They grabbed Duane.

  I could understand they were angry, and had reason. We were irresponsible jerks driving too fast on a narrow road—

  And then they began to eat Duane.

  The one crawling had him by the ankle and was biting through his pants legs, gnawing at his high-top boots, and the others were all over him, biting and pulling at him. I saw the black woman bite his ear and rip it off.

  Duane screamed. I started toward him, but Tommy, who had come around on my side of the car, grabbed me and pulled me back.

  I could see more clearly now, but somehow, what I was seeing was too strange to be real. Yet, there I was, standing next to Tommy on a moonlit road, far from where we grew up, watching a mass of people bite and gnaw at Duane.

  Duane screamed. Blood flew. Teeth snapped. They took him down. I could see naked asses through the hospital gown slits as the crazed crowd bent over him and began to rip at him with their hands and pull guts from his belly, lifting them to their mouths as if they were huge strands of spaghetti coated in marinara sauce.

  I could see too that some of those people had awful bite marks on them, like they had just escaped a pack of wild dogs. And the other thing was, well, they all looked dead. There was no spark in their eyes and they moved like puppets. And those two Matt had hit with his car, there was no way they should have survived, but they were going at poor Duane like he was a buffet.

  I ran around to the trunk, stuck the key in there, popped it, and pulled out the tire iron.

  “No,” Tommy said, but it was too late. I was weighing in. Those people were murderers, and they were killing … well, had killed, Duane. His body steamed in the cool air where he had been ripped open. One of those things was pounding Duane’s head with its fists, cracking it apart like a giant walnut. Brains oozed and hands tore at the break in his skull. Brain matter was snatched and eaten.

  My hits were good ones. I turned my tire iron blows to their heads. If I hit their heads hard enough, they went down and didn’t get up. Otherwise, I didn’t hit the head, they just kept coming. None of it made any sense, but I knew I hated those things, and I was proving it. I knew too, without having to really think about it, they were all dead and I was making some of them deader.

  There were a lot of them, and then there were more. Tommy grabbed me, was p
ulling me back toward the car. Matt climbed into his GTO, woke the engine, and roared around us, nearly clipping us in the process.

  “Look,” Tommy said.

  I was no longer swinging the tire iron or struggling, so I looked. There were more of them coming down the hill, out of the woods. Some of them looked to be little more than skeletal structure with a thin parchment of skin stretched over them. Many were naked.

  “In the car,” Tommy said.

  The ones who had been snacking on Duane were close to us now, and I had no more than closed the car door, Tommy slipping in on the other side, when those things began to beat on the door glass. I fired up the engine, gunned it, hit one in front of the hood and sent it flying backwards into the road, and then I ran over it.

  We drove on, had to stop once and pull a small tree out of the road. It had taken that moment in time to fall and block our path. It took some work, but thank goodness it wasn’t too big a tree and those things weren’t around.

  Some time later we saw Matt’s car. He had skidded out and hit a tree. Driver’s side door was open, but he wasn’t in view.

  Eventually we came to Dead Man’s Curve, and since we had outdistanced those things by quite a bit, we were going slow and made the curve easy, but I was glad I hadn’t been racing. That curve, let me tell you, it was a bitch. I saw off to our right that the earth fell off into a man-made cut about the size of the largest moon crater, and it was full of still water. The old rock quarry. It stretched for a great distance, and across the way I could see the straight-up wall on the other side, slick and snot-shiny in the moonlight.

  That’s when we came to more of those things, wandering across the road, and there was a driveway on the left, and I took it. I thought about smashing through those things, whatever the hell they were, but they were too thick, and if I wrecked the car we’d be out here with them, just me and Tommy fighting for our lives with a tire iron and wishful thinking.