“This is a fine, all-American home in Butler, Pennsylvania. A family of four has been murdered, and their bodies appear to have been chewed on. According to a statement by the coroner, it is likely the result of an animal attack. However, this reporter did speak to a witness, Miss Ella Rimer, who tells a different story.”
“Yeah, I saw a fella shuffling away from the house. It was pretty strange, I’ll tell you, just stumbling along. I tried to get his attention, but he just kept going, you know? Wouldn’t even pick his feet up off the floor. Strangest thing. And he seemed to have blood on his face.”
“Miss Rimer says that she did mention this person to the police. It’s possible that this stranger is the owner of the animal that attacked the victims. More on this story as it develops. This is Harvey Lincoln for WIC-TV news. Back to you in the studio.”
* * *
Harvey stood impatiently at the phone booth, waiting for the reporter from KDKA to finish using the pay phone. Unlike the phone booths in Pittsburgh, the glass was actually clean, which was typical of the suburbs, and Harvey could see his reflection. Since he was stuck waiting anyhow, he leaned in close to make sure his hair was looking good. He didn’t really trust Frank, his not-so-reliable cameraman, to tell him if the Brylcreem had failed in its duty to keep his hair in place.
His reflection was irritatingly blurry, though, and then he recalled that he hadn’t put his glasses on.
Just as he placed the plastic frames atop his ears and nose, the Pittsburgh reporter hung up and left. “All yours, fella.”
“Thanks.”
Harvey dropped a dime into the slot and then dialed the station.
“WIC-TV.”
“Hi, Maria, it’s Harvey, is Jack available?”
“Oh, hold the phone, Harvey, I’ll check.”
While he waited for Maria to track down their boss, Jack Olden, Harvey looked at his reflection in the metal change holder of the pay phone, checking his teeth.
“Damnit,” he grumbled, noticing that there was a sesame seed embedded between a couple of molars. Back when he started in the news biz, the black-and-white film probably wouldn’t have even picked the light-colored seed up, but in color? Frank was going to be on the receiving end of a knuckle sandwich for not telling him about that seed, which he picked out with his carefully manicured fingernails.
“What are you complaining about now, Harvey?” came the voice of the station manager.
“Hi, Jack. Uh, nothing, I just—Did the live feed go okay?”
“It was fine, though I wish you’d said you were live.”
“I thought you might be using it for other broadcasts.”
“You think really highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“I think highly of the story, Jack. I mean, heck, we’re talking the first multiple homicide in Butler County since the Pillow Killer back in the twenties! In fact, if you want, I can dig into the archives, do a little piece for the weekend about the Pillow Killer—”
“You’re not gonna have time.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. I can—”
“Since when is life fair? Actually, I’m glad you called because believe it or not, there’s a second multiple homicide in Butler County since the Pillow Killer.”
Harvey swallowed down his complaint. “What?”
“Get over to West Penn and North Chestnut. There’s a house on the corner with a bunch of dead bodies.”
“You bet.”
Hanging up the phone, Harvey yanked the phone booth door open and yelled, “Frank!”
As usual, Frank looked up at Harvey with the look of a deer captivated by oncoming headlights. “What’d I do, man?” he asked defensively.
Harvey decided to table the discussion of his seed-infested teeth. “Nothing we need to worry about right now. We got another crime scene to get to.”
“Jesus Christ, another one?”
As he climbed into the passenger side of the white WIC-TV van, Harvey said, “You shouldn’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”
* * *
“I’m standing at my fourth straight multiple homicide scene in the last three days, and that’s just in Butler and Armstrong Counties. Scenes like this are occurring in Clarion County, Allegheny County, and Westmoreland County as well. The county coroner’s offices and the city, county, and state police are all standing by their story that these attacks are being made by a wild animal. However, witnesses tell a different story.”
“I heard a terrible noise next door, so I ran over to see, and I swear to God almighty above that there was a man in there chawin’ on Edna!”
“What do you mean by ‘chawin’,’ Mr. Posey?”
“Just what I said! He was eatin’ Edna’s arm!”
“Other witnesses at the other crime scenes have made similar reports. Butler City Police Chief Brandon Painter had this to say…”
“I don’t appreciate these wild stories going around about people eating other people. That kind of talk is irresponsible and doesn’t help the good men of my police force when they try to work to solve these horrible crimes. We’ve never seen anything like this in my thirty years on this job, and solving these crimes is hard enough without people spreading foolishness.”
“Despite Chief Painter’s confidence, these reports would appear to be far from ‘foolishness.’ This reporter spoke to an employee of the county coroner’s office, who would only speak on condition of anonymity, and he assured me that the attacks on these poor people don’t match any known animal—certainly not any animal ever sighted in this state. None of the local zoos have reported any animals to be missing. For WIC-TV, I’m Harvey Lincoln.”
* * *
As Harvey headed for the conference room for the WIC-TV news crew’s morning meeting, he was intercepted by Linda Kamin, whose high heels clacked on the linoleum floor as she strode to block his path.
“You’re a louse, you know that?”
Harvey smiled. “I’m a reporter, Linda, we’re all louses. You’d wilt under a can of Raid, same as me.”
“That was my source in the coroner’s office! And I told you about it in confidence—I was going to use it!”
“Oh, really? When was that going to be, before or after you interviewed the head of the school board? Or covered a sewing circle? Or gave us the inside poop about the PTA?”
Linda pursed her lips. “I’m a reporter just like you. And I might have gotten a story on this—God knows everyone else is. And it’s not fair of you to steal my source like that!”
“Since when is life fair? Don’t we have to get to a meeting?”
“I can tell you one thing for free, mister—I’m assuming any conversation we have is on the record. And you pull something like that again, I’ll tell everyone what your real last name is.”
Harvey swallowed. “You wouldn’t.”
“Watch me.” With that, she entered the conference room.
His face had gotten sweaty all of a sudden, his glasses sliding down his nose. Pushing them back up, he took a deep breath and entered the room.
Staring daggers at Linda, he found a seat between the news director and technical director. He hated sitting next to other reporters—especially right now.
Linda’s real last name was Kaminski, but she had no problem with people knowing she was a Polack, she just preferred “Kamin” for being on camera because people sometimes stumbled over her real name.
Harvey’s real last name was “Lipshitz,” and that was a carefully guarded secret.
Jack came in and said, “All right, boys and girls, we’ve got a whole new ballgame.”
Harvey sat up and the susurrus of noise in the room died.
“We just got verified reports from the North Side Cemetery, Greenlawn, Mt. Royal Cemetery, Kittanning Cemetery, and West View Cemetery here in town of corpses climbing out of their graves.”
The silence mutated into laughs.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Pull my other leg, why don’tcha?”
“C’mon, Jack, April Fools is in April, not—”
“I’m serious!”
Harvey actually flinched. He’d been working for WIC for the better part of a decade, and he had never in any of that time heard Jack Olden raise his voice.
“Listen to me, boys and girls, because we’re gonna be telling this story a lot over the next few days. This isn’t a bunch of animals on the loose, and this isn’t a serial killer. This is the dead coming to life.”
“Seriously, Jack?” one of the reporters asked.
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“No, you look like you’re gonna toss your cookies. So I’m worried.”
“You should be.” Jack turned to Harvey. “That source you had in the coroner’s office—any chance of getting a real statement now that things are going public?”
Glancing nervously at Linda, Harvey said, “Well, maybe. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good. We’ve got instructions coming down from the governor that anyone who dies has to be cremated right away.”
That took Harvey aback. “Really?”
“Yeah, really, it’s common sense,” Jack said.
“Well, yeah, but—I mean, what about the Jews?”
Jack gave him a blank look. “What about them?”
“Um, well, cremation is against the Jewish religion.”
Shrugging, Jack said, “If you say so. Who the hell knows what those people do.”
Harvey winced. That was why he admonished people for “blasphemy.” Keeping Christian camouflage kept him employed.
“All right,” Jack started, “assignments…”
* * *
After the meeting, Harvey practically ran out to his desk, hoping to avoid Linda altogether.
Maria waved at him as he walked toward his desk. “Harvey, you got a call on line four.”
“Thanks, doll.” He sat at his desk, leaning back in the wooden chair so it creaked, picked up the hook, stabbed the blinking button labeled “4,” and said, “Harvey Lincoln.”
“I’m sorry, I thought I was calling for Harvey Lipshitz. This is his father.”
Immediately, he straightened his back, the very sound of Dad’s voice forcing him into good posture. “It’s me, Dad. How are you?”
“Still dying inside every time I hear you call yourself by that name.”
Whispering so he wouldn’t be heard in the bullpen, he replied, “I told you, Dad, they don’t hire Jews to be reporters. They certainly don’t hire Jews whose names sound like swearing.”
“Don’t give me that nonsense. I know it’s because you’re ashamed. Why admit that your parents managed to escape before the Nazis came to Poland? Why let anyone know that I fought for our country against them and helped liberate Buchenwald? Why—”
“Dad, I’m really busy, I—”
“I called because of your mother.”
Harvey cut off his long-practiced diatribe about how busy he was in a desperate attempt to get him off the phone—which, on this occasion, had the benefit of actually being true—once Dad mentioned his mother. “What’s wrong with Mom?”
“She’s dying.”
“Is this her really dying or you thinking she’s dying because she coughed once?”
“Don’t you mouth off at me, she’s having trouble breathing! The oxygen tank isn’t helping anymore! I keep calling Dr. Schiff’s office and leaving messages with his secretary, but she won’t call me back!”
Sighing, Harvey said, “The doctor’s probably very busy, Dad, he—”
“I know, that’s why I’m worried!”
“Keep trying to call, okay, Dad? Look, I really do have a lot of work to do, they’re working us pretty hard on a story.”
“Is it about all the dead people?”
“Um—”
“It is, isn’t it? That’s why Dr. Schiff can’t give me the time of day anymore. Look, you be careful, Harvey Lipshitz, I don’t want anything bad to happen to you around all those dead people.”
“They’re dead, Dad, what can they do to me?”
* * *
“I’m here with Alvin Jefferson, the caretaker of Mt. Royal Cemetery. Mr. Jefferson, can you tell me what you saw today?”
“I’m swearin’ to you, Mr. Lincoln, it was like the devil himself came up from down below and brought his fury upon the Earth. It was straight out of the Book of Revelation, right there in the Bible.”
“Um, well, thank you, Mr. Jefferson, but can you be a bit more specific?”
“What’s it matter? Death ain’t death no more! People crawlin’ up from their graves and feedin’ on the livin’!”
“Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. For WIC-TV, this is Harvey Lincoln.”
* * *
It took forever for Harvey to find a working, unoccupied pay phone in Glenshaw, but he eventually did and told Frank to pull the van over.
“Can’t we just go back to the station?” Frank’s voice was almost whiny. “It’s only twenty minutes, man.”
“I just want to check in and see if there are any messages from my father.”
Frank sighed loudly and pulled the van over.
Harvey hopped out and put a dime in the phone booth before dialing the station. It was much better to check there to see if Dad had called rather than call Dad directly and have to actually talk to him.
“WIC-TV.”
“Hi, Maria, it’s Harvey, any messages?”
“Linda’s on the warpath looking for you.”
Harvey winced. He was still trying to figure out a way to ask her how to contact her coroner friend that wouldn’t end with one of her high heels stabbing him in the eye.
“Also,” Maria added, “your father called. He sounded pretty rattled.”
“Damnit. Thanks, doll.”
With a heavy heart, he pushed down the metal lever and then let go, hearing a dial tone even as his dime rattled to the bottom of the phone. He put another dime in and dialed the phone number for the house he grew up in.
“Hello?”
Harvey hesitated. His father sounded awful. “Dad, it’s Harvey.”
“Oh, Harvey, thank goodness! Your mother’s dying, Harvey, and I keep calling nine-one-one and nobody answers!”
Closing his eyes, Harvey said, “Keep trying, Dad. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
He hung up and hopped back into the van. “We’re going to Kittanning.”
“Say what?” Frank got that deer-in-the-headlights look again. Plus, his mouth hung open, making him look kind of like a fish.
Pointing at the road ahead, Harvey said, “Drive to Kittanning, right now.”
“That’s an hour away!”
“Then you’d better get moving.”
“No way, man, I can’t—”
“Drive, Frank, or I tell Jack about the reefer you were smoking when you thought I wasn’t looking last week.”
“Aw, c’mon, man, that’s not fair.”
“Since when is life fair? Drive.”
Frank put the van into gear and grumbled, “This is a bad scene, man.”
* * *
By the time they arrived at Kittanning, a town that straddled the Allegheny River, it was dark out.
“Man, this is uncool.”
“Will you please shut up?” Harvey was about ready to strangle Frank at this point. He should have just gone back to the station and then taken his own car here. But Dad’s voice was so anxious. He’d never sounded like that, except when Grandma was dying.
“Shit!”
Startled by Frank’s interjection, Harvey looked up to see a man standing right in the middle of Market Street.
Frank swerved to avoid the man—who was just standing there—and drove the van straight for a bank’s façade.
Harvey was thrown violently forward, his head colliding against the windshield, his ribs smashing into the dashboard.
For a few seconds, he just sat there on the floor in front of the passenger seat, his ears ringing.
Reaching up, he yanked at the door handle, and the van passenger door creaked open with a metallic screech.
His first thought was that he was going to have to fill out a ton of paperwork on the damaged van.
Glancing over at the driver’s side, he saw that Frank was sitting in the seat, held in by his seat belt. He looked unconscious.
Belatedly realizing that he should have worn his own seat belt, Harvey tried to climb out of the van, and instead fell to the pavement.
Something was getting into his eyes. He rubbed his eyes, and then saw blood on his fingers.
Touching his forehead, it felt slick.
Clambering to his feet, Harvey looked back to see that the same man was just standing there in the middle of Market Street.
“Hey!” he cried, stumbling toward the man. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Then he got a good look at the man. His eyes were milky white, his teeth were rotten, and he had a giant hole in his flannel shirt—and also in his chest. In fact, Harvey could see clear through to the other side, bits of gore and shattered bone and muscle dripping inside the hole.
For thirty hours now, he’d been hearing about strange people wandering around and the dead coming to life, and all sorts of other craziness.
But this was his first time face-to-face with it.
He ran.
In pure panic, Harvey didn’t pick a direction, but his subconscious must have been working properly because after a minute, he found himself on Sampson Street, running toward the house he grew up in.
Aside from that—that animated corpse, he hadn’t seen anyone on the street at all.
He wasn’t sure what was stranger.
It took him several seconds of fumbling to get the latch to the front gate open—his hands were still slick with his own blood mingled with sweat—but he managed it. The gate squeaked like it always did, and he ran down the cracked pavement of the walkway to the front door.
“Dad?” he said as he yanked open the screen door. It was unlocked, the inner wooden door left open on this warm evening. “You home?”
“Harvey? Harvey, is that you?”
“I’m here, Dad.”
His father came out into the foyer from the living room dressed in his usual around-the-house wear: a white T-shirt, boxer shorts, and leather slippers. Tears were streaking down his cheeks and into his thick mustache. “Harvey, I don’t know how much longer your mother will be with us.”
He led Harvey into the living room, where Mom was lying on the couch, plastic tube in her nose connected to the oxygen tank, her drawn, wrinkled skin white as a sheet. Her stomach was moving up and down ever so slightly, so she was still alive, but that was the only indication that she was.
Against one wall was the giant wooden credenza with the television inside it, and one of the anchors was on the air. Harvey found himself unable to remember the anchorman’s name—he wore his glasses on the air, which Harvey thought was dumb—and he was droning on about how important it was to cremate the bodies of anyone who dies.
“Harvey, what happened to you?”
Only then did Harvey remember that he’d left Frank in the van. “I’m fine, Dad. I mean, no, I’m not fine, but—”
“Sit down, I’ll take care of that. Army taught me first aid, might as well use it.”
Within minutes, he had out bandages, alcohol, cotton, paper tape, and paper towels. It stung when he rubbed the alcohol on the cut on Harvey’s head after he wiped it down.
Once he taped the bandage onto Harvey’s forehead, Dad said, “I’ll call nine-one-one again.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea. Tell them about Frank.” He’d explained about what happened on Market Street while Dad dressed the wound.
Dad went over to the phone, and Harvey could hear the ringing after he dialed “1” the second time.
All he heard was ringing.
After the twelfth ring, Dad violently hung the phone up.
Just as he did, the camera cut to Harvey’s interview with the cemetery caretaker at Mt. Royal.
“Why don’t you wear your glasses on the television like that anchorman does?” Dad asked.
Harvey sighed. “Because I look stupid with the glasses on, Dad. Everyone does. Look, maybe I can go over the hospital, see what—”
Suddenly, Mom’s body shook with a tremendous coughing fit.
“Rifka!” Dad cried, and ran over to the couch, kneeling by her side, grabbing her hands with his even as she choked out several watery, ragged coughs.
Helplessly, Harvey just stood there. He wanted to do something for his mother—and something for Frank—but calling 911 was what you were supposed to do. It was why they’d just adopted 911 for emergencies, so you didn’t need to know the local precinct number or the hospital number.
But if it wasn’t working …
Reaching into his pocket for his notebook, he flipped through the pages until he found the number for the emergency room at the Armstrong County hospital over on Route 28.
However, dialing it just got a busy signal.
He tried the Armstrong County Sheriff’s Office, but that one just rang and rang like 911 did.
After slamming the phone down even harder than his father had, he started, “Dad, I’m going—”
“Rifka!”
Moving over to the sofa, Harvey saw that his mother had stopped coughing. And also stopped breathing.
Getting to his feet, Dad tugged at Harvey’s arm. “You have to save her!”
“What? How?”
“Didn’t you learn mouth-to-mouth that time last year?”
“I did a story on it, Dad, I never learned it.”
“Why won’t you help your mother?”
“Dad, there’s nothing I can do! The hospital’s line is busy, the cops aren’t answering, I don’t—”
But his father was now pounding his chest with what little strength he had. “You always hated us, you were always ashamed of us!”
“Dad, that’s not fair—”
“That’s why you changed your name, because you hate me and you hate that she took my name, and now you’re happy she’s dead!”
“Dad!” He grabbed his father’s arms at the wrist. “Stop it! Listen to me, we have to burn her body.”
“What?”
“We have to—”
He pulled away from Harvey’s grip. “How dare you! How dare you reject your heritage again for your stupid job!”
“Dad, for pity’s sake, you’re not being fair! None of this has anything to do with my job! You’ve been watching the news, dead people are coming back to life!”
“Only the Lord can do that, and it’s the Lord who tells us not to burn a body like it was trash! Get out of my house, you filth! Get out!”
“Dad, I—” Harvey cut himself off, and stormed past him, through the kitchen and out the back door to the yard.
As he figured, there was a pile of firewood. Dad used to cut it himself, but then he got too old, so they hired a neighborhood kid to do it.
Harvey may not have known mouth-to-mouth, but he was a Boy Scout years ago, and he knew how to start a fire.
Within minutes, he’d arranged the logs into a shape that he could put Mom’s body on, and gotten them ignited.
“What are you doing? Are you trying to burn the house down?”
Turning, he saw Dad standing in the kitchen doorway.
“No, Dad, I told you—we have to burn the body.”
“There is no body, you smart-aleck! She’s still alive!”
Harvey whirled around to face his father, who had a very smug smile on his face. “What?”
“She’s alive!” He stepped aside, and Harvey saw his mother stumbling forward toward the doorway.
His heart beating like a trip-hammer in his chest, Harvey cried out, “Dad, get out of there! Dad!”
“You never cared about us at all, did you, Harvey? No wonder you changed your—”
Then one of Mom’s hands clamped down on Dad’s shoulder.
“Rifka, what’re you—”
And then Mom’s mouth levered open and she bit Dad’s neck.
Harvey couldn’t tell where Dad’s strangled screams ended and his own frightened screams began.
He ran to the door, pulling Dad away from Mom’s attempted mastication of his neck.
Dad fell to the floor, blood pouring from his neck.
Mom started clawing at Harvey, but Harvey was able to fight her off as easily as he had done with Dad.
Then Harvey grabbed Mom’s wrists the same way he’d grabbed Dad’s and dragged her out to the backyard, throwing her into the fire.
Strangely, Mom didn’t make a sound, didn’t struggle, she just stood there, burning. The smell of acrid flesh assaulted Harvey’s nostrils as he ran back to the house, grabbing Dad’s much heavier body and dragging it out into the yard. Harvey had covered enough murders to know that Dad would never survive the amount of blood he’d lost that was now pooled on the kitchen’s linoleum floor.
Mom was still just standing there, burning up. It was the strangest thing Harvey had seen. And today, that was up against some fairly stiff competition.
He dropped Dad’s body into the fire at Mom’s feet, hoping that the Lord would understand why he was violating the proscription against cremation.
Certainly, his father was unlikely to have ever understood.
As their bodies burned, Harvey said, “I just wanted to be a good reporter, Dad. Nobody’s gonna say, ‘Let’s go to Harvey Lipshitz in the field’ with a straight face. Lincoln was a great president. Lipshitz is a punch line. I don’t know why you couldn’t understand that.”
After a few minutes, he found himself unable to watch anymore.
He walked around the house to Sampson Street, where he saw more people shuffling along, not picking up their feet, moving at an insanely slow pace.
One of them was Frank.
Without thinking, Harvey ran toward the little twerp, never more glad to see his idiot cameraman than he was now. “Frank, thank goodness! Get your camera, we’ve got to—”
But Frank hadn’t stopped walking. And as soon as he was close enough, he bit down on Harvey’s arm.
Harvey screamed in pain as Frank bit into him. He tried to shake the cameraman off, but Frank wouldn’t let go—he was like a dog with a bone.
He tried to pull away, but all he did was stumble backward and fall to the pavement. Frank was on top of him now, straddling him, staring down at him with milky white eyes.
I can’t die like this! I can’t! It’s not fair!
As Frank went for his neck, Harvey’s last thought was, Since when is life fair?
* * *
“The scene in Kittanning is a vicious one this morning, as deputies from the Armstrong County Sheriff’s office have managed to capture and burn several bodies before the arrival of the National Guard to take control of the situation. I was able to briefly speak with Sheriff Emmett Nelson, who reiterated the cautions we’ve all heard during this horrible crisis.”
“I know the government’s been saying all sorts of things about what caused this, but truly, it doesn’t matter where it all came from. What does matter is that everyone should stay in their homes, and if they encounter one of these ghouls, or whatever they are, to try to damage their heads or spines. That seems to kill them. And for God’s sake, cremate any dead body you see! Even if it’s just lighting a damn match, do something!”
“This reporter was able also to ascertain that two of the bodies that were cremated in Kittanning belonged to WIC-TV employees Harvey Lincoln and Frank DeMartino. We all mourn their loss, and those of all the other citizens who, in essence, lost their lives twice. For WIC-TV, I’m Linda Kamin. Back to you in the studio.”