Deep Trouble Read online

  I bought the candlesticks, just in case, even though they didn’t strike me as particularly unusual or especially attractive. Nothing in the other two boxes looked even remotely magical, and I figured I’d alert Father Leo, and he could send in a specialist if he thought the risk warranted.

  My phone rang as I got into my car, and I recognized Father Leo’s number. “The shop was a bust,” I told him. “But I found out the name of the guy who owned the book. Sounds like he liked to buy whatever struck his fancy, and the book probably caught his eye.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about Hoffman,” Father Leo promised. “But we’ve got a more immediate problem. I managed to work out the spell Taylor cast, and I read through the rest of the materials we took along with the book. He was playing a gaming campaign—I don’t think he realized that the grimoire was real, or maybe the book deceived him. The first challenge for his party of adventurers was to fight an army of the undead raised from a sunken cemetery.”

  “That’s what the spell was for?” I echoed. “Then we’re fine, right? Because we’re a long way from the coast, so there’s no Atlantis to raise the dead from.”

  “Never said the graves sank in the ocean, Mark,” Father Leo reproved me gently. “They flooded hundreds of acres of farmland to make that lake. Farms with small, private cemeteries from long enough ago nobody bothered to relocate them, if they could have even found them all.”

  “Shit.” Lake Wilhelm is a man-made flood control lake made from damming up natural springs and creeks just a few miles up the highway in a little burg called Sandy Lake. I’d been out on Lake Wilhelm fishing a time or two. It’s a pretty place, with boat launches and hiking trails, but a bunch of zombies would ruin the vibe.

  “From what we can gather, Taylor based the idea on his grandfather’s old farm, which is now mostly underneath the lake. There was a small cemetery that probably didn’t get moved when they flooded the land. That’s where the zombies are coming from each night.”

  “It’s been happening since the last game?”

  “Yeah, Taylor played with his gaming group on Saturday nights, at a cabin on what’s left of the old farm,” Father Leo replied. “So, yes, since then.”

  Aw, fuck. That meant that for three nights running, a bunch of sopping wet, long-dead reanimated corpses had been giving the good people of Sandy Lake one hell of a surprise. “There’s a lot of shoreline and several boat launches. I can’t cover them all myself, and if we bring in that many shooters, we’ll have the civilians in a panic faster than you can say ‘Jade Helm.’”

  Father Leo chuckled. “Meet me at Chiara’s coffee shop in an hour. I’ve got the topographical maps, and I know where his grandfather’s farm was. I’m sure that you and Blair can come up with a plan.”

  I muttered some things under my breath that most people probably wouldn’t say in front of a priest and hung up. I hadn’t thought it was possible, but this might be a new low for a weekend, even for me.

  “I made your coffee special, just the way you like it,” Chiara Hamilton greeted me, and I caught a whiff of Jameson when she set the cup down. “It’s from my private stock,” she added with a wink, and I figured she spiked my cup from her flask since the shop doesn’t have a liquor license.

  “Blair’s a lucky woman to be married to you,” I grumbled, not able to completely hide my appreciative grin as I breathed in the soothing smell of coffee and whiskey.

  “Damn right,” Blair replied, plunking down next to me and giving me a good-natured punch in the shoulder that stung, just a little.

  Blair Hamilton inherited Hamilton Hardware in downtown Conneaut Lake when her parents passed away, and after a couple of tours of duty in the army, Blair was ready to come home and settle down. She and Chiara had been head over heels for each other since high school, and despite Conneaut Lake being a small town and Chiara’s very Italian family, their marriage didn’t create much of a stir. Blair keeps a special back room at the hardware store for specialized “hunting supplies” for those of us who aren’t going out loaded for deer. They bought the building next to the hardware store, knocked out a doorway, and Chiara opened a coffee shop and bookstore that’s become a popular hangout. I can personally attest that Chrystal Dreams has the best coffee in a four-township radius.

  “Are you bribing me or providing a consolation prize?” I asked Chiara.

  “Maybe a little of both,” she replied with a grin.

  We grabbed our coffees, and then Blair, Chiara, Father Leo, and I regrouped around a table in the coffee shop’s back room, since the store was closed. Usually, the the room is home to all kinds of gatherings, but tonight, the shop was oddly quiet.

  “The group that usually plays Cards Against Humanity tonight went to a concert fundraiser instead,” Chiara said, answering my unspoken question. “All of the concert’s proceeds benefit LGBTQA charities,” she added. The CAH group is open to everyone, but it’s also known to be a local safe place for teens who, for whatever reason, don’t fit into the local flannel shirt and pick-up truck culture.

  Father Leo spread a map across the table, and we anchored it with coffee mugs. I sat next to him, while Blair and Chiara settled in across from us. “This is a map of the area before they built the lake,” he said. “And the red outline is the flooded area. Most of what’s down there was forest and pasture land, but if you go back to even older maps, you can see some family graveyards. By the time the land was purchased for the dam, no one had been buried in those old cemeteries for generations. Some of the farms had been sold several times, so I’m betting that people had forgotten all about the graves, and none of the bodies were moved.”

  “So, do you think Taylor’s spell will reanimate all of them or just the graves on his family farm?” I asked. “And are the zombies going to swim for shore, or walk out on the bottom of the lake, like in that pirate movie?”

  Father Leo shrugged. “Taylor meant to only target his grandfather’s farm. Let’s not borrow trouble. We just need to be ready for them.”

  “Setting up a sniper’s roost with a high-powered rifle on parkland is a federal offense.”

  Father Leo grinned at me. “That’s why you’re not going to be on parkland,” he replied. “And we’ve got back-up to drive any wayward zombies in your direction.”

  “Back-up?”

  Chiara raised her flask in a mock toast. “Yep. I called in the cavalry. The coven is ready and willing.” The Tuesday night women’s group that met for “Bunko” in the bookstore’s community room was, in reality, a coven of local witches.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. We didn’t usually involve civilians, although witches, at least, weren’t going to be surprised about the supernatural aspects.

  “Relax. It’ll be fine,” Chiara replied. “They’ll use their magic to herd the zombies toward you. Then you pick them off, and bye-bye shamblers.”

  “How do we explain the dead bodies with their heads blown open?”

  Blair grinned. “I’ve got a plan—and the supplies you’re going to need. Leave it to me.”

  Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to flood an old graveyard to make a dam?

  Apparently, the Pennsylvania Department of Wildlife, or Parks and Recreation, or whatever state agency gets to be in charge of lakes. I stood on a hill overlooking Lake Wilhelm, just outside of Sandy Lake, and waited for the zombies.

  I’d found a sheltered spot with a good view in an old scout camp on a ridge above an abandoned gravel pit with a perfect vantage point to the lakeshore nearest the old graveyard on the sunken Ellerbee farm. The night wind rustled through the trees, reminding me that early spring in these parts is really still winter. I’d dressed for the weather, but since I wasn’t moving around, I shivered.

  Zombies were one of my least favorite things to kill. They could be wicked fast, and they stank. Any injuries they caused were guaranteed to get infected and blowing them up made a mess. Since leaving body parts strewn around tended to rai
se inconvenient questions, that meant I didn’t just have to shoot the damn things; I also had to clean up the mess afterward.

  On the plus side, zombies weren’t clever, just driven by hunger and a reflex to attack. But since they couldn’t feel pain and they were already dead, just shooting them or hacking them apart didn’t stop them. That took a bullet to the brain or cutting off the head. Since I didn’t want to get close enough for decapitation, here I was, freezing my ass off in a drafty, vandalized scout cabin the size of a school bus that I had repurposed as a hunting blind.

  Father Leo had figured out a lot about Taylor’s spell, but the timing had been tougher to pin down. That meant the witches and I were stuck keeping vigil for a couple of hours, which was the best the good padre could do to narrow down the timeframe.

  “We’ve got a visual.” Blair’s voice came over my headset. Just to be safe, we had agreed to send her as a second sharpshooter to back up the coven, although if a bunch of witches couldn’t handle a zombie invasion, then the odds were against me stopping them singlehandedly.

  “Copy that. What do you see?” I replied quietly.

  “Movement under the water that’s too big to be fish,” Blair responded. “So the ‘sisters’ are steering them your way.”

  Old records on the drowned cemeteries were non-existent, so we had no way to know how many shambling dead were likely to be answering the grimoire’s summons. When I’d questioned Taylor, he’d been vague about what the zombies were supposed to do after they rose from their graves. I had the distinct impression that he intended to make that part of his gaming campaign up as he went or roll the dice to determine the next moves. But since Taylor was locked up for his own safety, and the grimoire had been spirited away by the Occulatum, nobody was controlling the zombies, who had no further directions other than “rise.”

  I guess that beat having a bunch of zombies programmed to eat the townspeople and wreak havoc, and in my business, I’ve learned to take whatever breaks I can get since there aren’t many. I settled into my perch and swept the lakefront with my night scope.

  And there they were. I saw the water ripple a few yards out, where the lake was deeper, and then half a dozen forms broke the surface. Even with my night vision scope, I couldn’t see their faces, and given how long they’d been dead, buried and submerged, I thanked Heaven for small favors. I took in a long breath and let it out, stilled my mind, and aimed.

  One shot rang out, then four more in quick succession. Even at this distance, I hit my targets, and I could see their skulls explode like ripe melons. It helped that they weren’t running or even trying to dodge. The sixth zombie stumbled and fell back into the water before I could shoot him, but I figured I’d get my chance.

  Rifle shots in the woods around these parts aren’t remarkable since most people hunt. Gunshots this late at night, on the other hand, couldn’t be easily explained away. Father Leo said he’d come up with a diversion to lead the local cops away from the lake and keep them busy for a while, but I didn’t want to have to explain myself if they called for back-up.

  Seven, eight, nine. More zombies, more bullets. I hoped the lake wasn’t also a reservoir because no matter what we did to hide the bodies, there were going to be bloody bits floating around.

  Ten through fifteen went down easy, walking right out of the water and into my sights. I kept firing and reloading, getting occasional updates from Blair to let me know more shamblers were on the way.

  “Can you hurry them up?” I muttered to Blair. “The longer I’m up here shooting, the more likely that the local boys in blue are going to come around to see what’s going on.”

  “Got you covered,” Blair replied. “One of our ladies put a deflection spell on you, and she’s distorting the sound to make it difficult to pinpoint. Should last long enough to get the work done.”

  “I don’t like ‘should,’” I grumbled. “I like definite words like ‘will.’ ‘Should’ might mean you and your wife need to come visit and bring me a cake with a file in it.”

  “If she bakes it, you know it’ll be the best damn jail-break cake ever,” Blair replied. Chiara’s parents own a restaurant and bakery with drool-worthy Italian pastries.

  “I’d rather not find out for myself,” I answered. “But tell the ‘sisters’ thanks.”

  Bang, splat. Bang, splat. By my count, we’d edged upward of thirty, and I wondered how many people had been buried in that old plot. I’d been to a few small farm cemeteries in my line of work, and most had about a dozen tombstones, tops. Then again, this area’s been consistently inhabited for a long, long time, so for all I knew, Taylor hadn’t just raised the dead from that old graveyard, but the occasional unlucky trapper or explorer from before the Revolutionary War, perhaps even older bones buried by the Native American tribes that had once settled near the family farm. There are a whole lot more dead people than we like to think about, and we don’t come close to knowing where they’ve all been buried.

  I picked off another six zombies, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. That’s when I heard the scrape of footsteps on gravel and caught a glimpse of motion outside my hiding place.

  Shit. Just as I turned to get out of the small bunkhouse, two dripping forms blocked the exit. The wind carried the smell of rotting flesh and fishy water, and I choked back a reasonable gag reflex.

  I got off one shot before the zombies rushed me, but the second one charged as his companion crumpled. Up close, the stench was even worse, making my eyes water. I pivoted and smashed at his rotted face with the butt of my rifle. Brittle bones crumbled with a snap, but the thing kept right on coming. I backed up, enough to get the muzzle of my rifle jammed right up beneath the zombie’s chin, and pulled the trigger.

  The shambler’s head exploded, all over me and all over the back wall of the bunkhouse. That did it. Everyone’s got limits, and I’d hit mine. I puked all over his zombie gobbets, and if I’d thought that the bunkhouse couldn’t smell any worse than it did, I was wrong.

  I staggered, heaving, from the small cabin, only to find three more zombies scrambling up the hillside, leaving bits of themselves behind on all the bramble bushes and the barbed wire fence at the edge of the gravel pit.

  “Aw, shit,” I muttered, trying not to get light headed from the smell. My favorite rifle had been besmirched by zombie guts, both on the stock and on the muzzle, and somehow that made the whole thing even worse.

  One of the creatures rushed me, and my first shot blew his chest apart. He dropped onto his back, but the legs kept dragging him forward as his hands pushed against the moist soil. I didn’t have time to take the headshot to put him down since the other two decided to come at me together.

  I got one of the zombies right between the eyes, and he fell like a bag of bones. The other tackled me, and we went down in a heap. I used my weight to roll us since although zombies are crazy strong, they aren’t heavy. The jelly-like squishiness of his rotten and water-soaked dead flesh made me dry heave, and I’ll hear the squelch that accompanied every motion in my dreams.

  If I’d had a handgun, I might have gotten it between us to put a bullet through his midsection. But my rifle wouldn’t do the trick, and I didn’t fancy using it to bludgeon him since I was too damn close in case it accidentally went off. The skull loomed over my face, with dangling tendrils of matted hair and tattered skin, jaws wide and teeth bared.

  So, I did what I would have done in any bar fight and clocked the sucker right in the mouth.

  The zombie reeled back, but his bony hands still gripped my shoulders. I brought my feet up and kicked, which ripped him apart above the hips and sent his lower half flying. It landed near the zombie I shot that was still dragging himself across the ground, and they got tangled up.

  I didn’t have time to worry about it because the top half of the zombie—the half with teeth—still had a hold of me. Water and other fluids I didn’t want to think about dripped down on me. I rolled us again, coming up on top, an
d when the vise-grip the zombie had on my right arm faltered, I delivered an uppercut that went full Rock-em, Sock-em on his head and popped it clean across the clearing.

  Under other circumstances, I might have felt more charitable toward the dead, somberly reflecting on their humanity or feeling sad that their eternal rest had been disturbed. Screw that. Tonight, I was pissed, especially since I now had a headless zombie’s upper body still holding on to my left arm, and the shambler with a see-through chest hadn’t stopped inching his way on his ass toward me.

  I pried the half-zombie off my arm and shot him because he had it coming. Then I turned and got a headshot on the zombie with the hole in his chest and an extra pair of legs tangled around his torso. That was just all kinds of wrong, and I didn’t want to think about it.

  “That’s all of them,” Blair said through the headset. “At least, I don’t see any more coming out of the water. Time to clean up.”

  Easier said than done, especially when I got stuck doing the mop-up. Grumbling under my breath, I grabbed the shovel and tarp I’d left in the corner of the bunk cabin. With the tarp spread out on the ground, I scooped up zombie bits and put them onto the plastic. When I’d collected all the big chunks, I tied off the tarp and hooked it to the ATV I’d left parked in the woods, then dragged the whole thing down to the lake.

  Fortunately, I brought my rifle. Blair had the brilliant idea to spread a roll of chicken wire across the boat launch entrance below the gravel pit. Zombies aren’t very agile, so having to navigate a path covered with fencing wire was designed to slow them down. Most of them managed to get across the obstacle, but several remained stuck, either because they had slipped through the holes or their rotted clothing caught on the sharp wire.

  Five more shamblers flopped on the rolled-out fencing like fish out of water. Taking the kill shots was easy, and a little sad. The zombies hadn’t asked to be disturbed from their final slumber, and no personal grudge of theirs made them rise. They had been pawns—no, puppets—of a teenager who hadn’t realized that magic was real or ever dreamed that his actions had real-life consequences. And as much as I thought Taylor Ellerbee deserved a punch to the jaw for causing this mess, the truth was, he never thought the book would actually work. Just one big dumb clusterfuck, all the way around.