Free The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor Page B

of the town, and tell them what’s happened. The sooner the better, before we’re overrun by the dead.”
    “How do you propose we notify everyone? Go door to door?”
    Edsel glanced away from the snow-spattered road to give Daniel a look of complete contempt. “Are you serious? Go forth and harness the mighty power of the Lutheran organization, man. Call up the Women’s Circle and get them to unleash the awful majesty of their phone trees!”
     
    “I was thinking to myself, in a horror movie, the black guy always dies first,” Stevie Ray said. Otto and Rufus and Harry were all jammed in the hallway, with Stevie Ray looking down on them from the attic opening in the ceiling. Dolph and his rifle were out in the living room watching over old man Levitt. “So I was thinking, Not me , and I had my gun out. Still scared the crap just about right out of me when the girl-zombie started moving. She’s wrapped up in about fifteen layers of heavy-duty plastic, though, so she was mostly just rolling a little bit. I probably could’ve saved the bullet, but I put one in her head anyway. Couple other girls up here in plastic, too, but they look like they’re pretty much just bones, so they’re not moving.”
    “Good to know,” Harry said.
    Rufus coughed. “The black guy doesn’t always die first in horror movies.”  
    Otto rolled his eyes, but he figured Rufus felt compelled to weigh in, as this was an area in which he had some expertise.
    “In the original Night of the Living Dead movie, a black guy’s even the hero.”
    “Does he make it out alive in the end?” Stevie Ray asked.
    “Well. No.”
    “Mmm hmm.”
    “Back to the matter at hand.” Harry sniffed. “I thought most serial killers liked just one kind of victim. You know, they like to specialize.”
    Stevie Ray grunted. “I figure old man Levitt decided he needed to kill a couple of girls now and then just to convince himself he wasn’t a homosexual. You know how it is for people of his generation. They have a hard time admitting things like that about themselves.”
    “Yup,” Harry said. “I could see how you may be right.”
    As always when the subject came up, Otto wondered in a rush of worry if maybe he wasn’t secretly gay. He’d never been attracted to men, really, but what did that prove? He wasn’t attracted to most women, either. Then Stevie Ray said, “Shit, something else is moving up here,” and a moment later he shouted, “Good GOD it’s a zombie raccoon, look out below!” and Otto was thankful to have something else to worry about for a couple of minutes.
     
    Dolph wanted to go by Eileen’s house and make sure she was okay, that she hadn’t fallen victim to a rampaging zombie min-pin or anything else, but was afraid it would look suspicious, so he’d better wait until nightfall, when he’d be less likely to attract notice. The thing about a town as small as Lake Woebegotten was that everybody knew your business, no matter how much you might wish it was otherwise. Still, they’d been discreet, and as far as anybody else knew, Eileen was just one of his customers, nothing special to him, and it was important to maintain the fiction.
    Unless, of course, Harry was wrong, and the zombie apocalypse really was going to forever change the very basic structure of life and society, in which case, all the old rules about infidelity might just cease to apply. Probably the few remaining survivors would need to get started repopulating the Earth. Possibly Dolph would have to inseminate a great many women in order to do his part to restore the species to ascendancy. Now wasn’t that a pretty thought?
    The zombie in the bed of his truck thumped, which was nerve-wracking. They’d weighed the thing down with chains and thrown a tarp over it, and it didn’t have any arms or legs, but Dolph could imagine it wriggling its way toward the cab of the truck, silently sliding open the window with its teeth, and sinking fangs into his