Free The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor

that supposed to be any help to anybody? Playing Pong wasn’t going to make you a good tennis player, so killing zombies in some video game probably wasn’t too effective as training for killing zombies in the real world.  
    Harry didn’t pay him any attention, just went on talking about the game. “The thing that really gets me, though, is the syringes of adrenaline, you know, you inject them in the game and you can run faster and fight harder? If it was me, and I saw a full syringe laying on the ground in some burned-out grocery store surrounded by the hungry dead, I’m not so sure I’d just up and stick it into the first vein in my arm I came across.”
    “I might,” Rufus said. “But I’d probably be hoping it was something other than adrenaline. Something that would put me out of my misery.”
    “That’s a thought,” Harry said. “Why don’t we put this one out of his misery?” He nudged the limbless zombie with his boot.
    “First, I don’t think he’s miserable,” Rufus said. “I don’t think he’s feeling anything, other than hungry. And second… he’s proof. Of what’s happening. A real live… well, you know… a real zombie.”
    “Guess there might be some value there,” Harry agreed. “Shouldn’t be any harm in it as long as you stay clear of his teeth. So you’ve seen these fellas in action. What can you tell me?”
    “They’re slow. They don’t feel pain. They don’t stop until you mess up their brains. Even if you take a head off, it keeps moving, though the body stops.”
    “They contagious? Like, they bite you, you catch it?”
    “I don’t think it’s a disease,” Rufus said. “It’s just… the dead rising. These bodies were already dead, nobody bit them, they just woke up. So it’s contagious, but only because a zombie can kill you, and when you’re dead, you become one too.”
    “Well all right, then.” He hitched up his belt, though it slid back down under the weight of his gut. “Seems like we’ve got a fighting chance then.”
    “Against the end of the world?” Mr. Levitt said. “How do you figure that?”
    “There’s about 1,000 people in this town or in the farms just outside,” Harry said. “Some of them went down to Florida for the winter, or they’re off visiting family for the holidays, so it’s not quite all of them, but it’s enough. And if it’s just the dead waking up and walking around, not like a real plague, well… How many corpses do we have laying around here on any given day, do you think? If you hadn’t been keeping dead folks in shallow graves in your basement, Mr. Levitt, we might not have even noticed the zombie situation until one of the old folks passed on and tried to eat their relatives. Now maybe in the cities there’s hospitals and morgues full of dead folks and people getting shot dead for their tennis shoes by gangbangers and people overdosing on marijuana and guys jumping off roofs because they can’t stand the pressure of their CEO jobs anymore, but around here things are different. Most winters we only lose a handful of folks, and one of those is usually an unmarried agrarian Norwegian who puts a gun in his mouth, and not to be insensitive, but somebody who blows his brains out is solving any future personal zombie problem right then and there. I’d say it’s definitely a manageable situation here. We’ll call a town meeting, warn everybody to be on the lookout, and we’ll just be careful until this whole mess blows over.”
    “It’s not just people turning into zombies,” Dolph said. “I think, anyway. We saw this dog, half run over, and it was still trying to bite…”
    “What dog?” Mr. Levitt said. “Alta? Here, Alta, come to Daddy!”
    “Your dog’s a zombie dog now,” Otto said. No point trying to pretend something else was happening here now. Hard to admit Rufus had been right all along, but there it was, and he was man enough to admit it.
    Mr. Levitt began weeping quietly into the carpet.