Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio Page A

watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootee, leaving a trail of slime behind it.
    Jack fel over the end table she’d gotten at a yard sale just after they had been married—she hadn’t been able to make her mind up about it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack final y said either she was going to buy it for their living room or he was going to give the biddy running the sale twice what she was asking for the goddam thing and then bust it up into firewood with—
    —with the—
    He struck the floor and there was a brittle, cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in two. The right hand tore the knitting needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eye socket and tossed it aside. His top half crawled toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together.
    She thought he was trying to grin, and then the baby kicked again and she thought: You buy it, Maddie, for Christ’s sake! I’m tired! Want to go home and get m’dinner! You want it, buy it! If you don’t, I’l give that old bat twice what she wants and bust it up for firewood with my —
    Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; pol uted teeth poised to bite. To kil her and kil the baby.
    She tore loose, leaving him with only her slipper, which he tried to chew and then spat out.
    When she came back from the entry, he was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen—at least the top half of him was—with the compass dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of her, and there seemed to be some idiot question in those black eye sockets before she brought the ax whistling down, cleaving his skul as he had threatened to cleave the end table.
    His head fel in two pieces, brains dribbling across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that squirmed with slugs and gelatinous sea worms, brains that smel ed like a woodchuck exploded with gassy decay in a high-summer meadow.
    Stil his hands clashed and clittered on the kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles.
    She chopped… she chopped… she chopped.
    At last there was no more movement.
    A sharp pain rippled across her midsection and for a moment she was gripped by terrible panic: Is it a miscarriage? Am I going to have a miscarriage? But the pain left… and the baby kicked again, more strongly than before.
    She went back into the living room, carrying an ax that now smel ed like tripe.
    His legs had somehow managed to stand.
    “Jack, I loved you so much,” she said, and brought the ax down in a whistling arc that split him at the pelvis, sliced the carpet, and drove deep into the solid oak floor beneath.
    The legs, separated, trembled wildly… and then lay stil .
    She carried him down to the cel ar piece by piece, wearing her oven gloves and wrapping each piece with the insulating blankets Jack had kept in the shed and which she had never thrown away—he and the crew threw them over the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn’t freeze.
    Once a severed hand tried to close over her wrist… then loosened.
    That was al .
    There was an unused cistern, pol uted, which Jack had been meaning to fil in. Maddie Pace slid the heavy concrete cover aside so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of him down, listening to the splashes, then worked the heavy cover back in place.
    “Rest in peace,” she whispered, and an interior voice whispered back that her husband was resting in pieces , and then she began to cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks, and she pul ed at her hair and tore at her breasts until they were bloody, and she thought, I am insane, this is what it’s like to be in—
    But before the thought could be completed, she had fal en down in a faint that became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt al right.
    She would never tel , though.
    Never.
    She understood, of course, that Dave knew nothing of this, and Dave would say nothing at al if she pressed. She kept her ears open, and she knew what he meant,