Honorable mention:
An Understanding
by Hillary Peatfield

Louella Beaudelaire knew a few things. She figured that after 73 years on God’s green earth, she had damned well better know a few things. Louella knew that to keep a garden healthy you put salt on the slugs and meal on the roses. She knew how to give a glare so good that those young men who crossed through her yard would pull up their pants and turn down their music and nod a polite hello to her. She knew that family was family, and life would take a turn one way or another every few years, and that the only thing that you could do when life took its turn was hold on to your family. Louella knew, too, that the line between life and death wasn’t as thin as most people thought. It was substantial enough to cast shadows. Things could live in those shadows, things made from spit and blood and bone; things that were never meant to cross that thick, solid line.

But sometimes they did.

Back in her youth (when she left school and for two glorious years was known as “Mademoiselle Louella, dancing- singing- fortune -telling, all for a nickel and step right up folks!”), Louella had seen a few things cross that line. Mostly they were zombies, and mostly they’d been raised by farmers to work in the fields.

Zombies were cheap to feed and didn’t require much in the way of housing, and it seemed to Louella that there was no real harm in it as long as they were cared for and fed. They’d given her the willies, though. She’d see them hanging about the edges of the fields, their eyes hollow and muddy in the light from the torches, waiting to drive their masters home. Every time she caught sight of one she’d shudder, like someone had just walked over her grave, though the grave wasn’t hers… and nobody was in it.

Some nights after the crowd had thinned and the only noise around the big top came from the men who’d set up a table to gamble at, Louella would smoke a pipe with Esther. Ester was the real fortune teller of the circus, and she and Louella would watch at the stars and talk. One night Louella spotted one of the zombies, patient as the grave so to speak, waiting for his master to loose his drinking money. Louella pointed him out, in his dusty, ragged suit, and asked Esther what she knew about zombies.

Louella got a real education that night. Esther told her all about the rituals that raised a zombie, and what they could be raised for. She told Louella about what happened if a zombie wasn’t fed, and how to stop one that went wild and put it back in its grave. Esther told Louella about zombies all night long, and Louella sat and listened, smoked her pipe and drank cheap red wine out of a pewter mug. Louella learned more about zombies that night than she hoped she’d ever need to know, but she had a feeling that if the Lord thought she needed to know this much, chances were one day she’d be grateful for the knowledge.

A couple months later, Esther ran off and married a farmer from one of the towns the carnival had stopped in. A week later, the carnival had moved on another 50 miles, and Louella had become the headliner of the fortune teller act, with a raise of a dollar a night.

It was closer to dawn than dusk, and Louella had just fallen asleep when the banging started on her trailer door. Louella ignored it as long as she could, but eventually pulled on a tattered dressing gown and answered. Lester Beaudelaire, the carnival’s head handyman, stood on the step, his eyes wild.

“Louella, John’s dead and they think it was an animal but I know it wasn’t and I think I know what it was. You gotta come, Louella, please!” He exclaimed, all in one breath. Louella looked over Lester’s’ head towards the big top and saw men with torches and women in their dressing gowns gathered in a group. She looked back at Lester, nodded solemnly, and ducked into her trailer. A few moments later she emerged carrying a mug of long-cold coffee, with her pipe clamped firmly between her teeth.

“Tell me what happened, Lester.” She said, as she gathered her dressing gown around her and started off towards the commotion.

John, the strongman who lifted paper maiche dumb bells between acts in the big top, had been found outside the tent’s door. Louella pushed her way to the front of the crowd, her eyes on the body in front of her, ears cocked to the voices of the men with the shotguns and crow bars. What lay on the ground before her looked more like a piece of meat than a man, and Louella sucked furiously on her pipe and prayed to the Lord to keep it that way as she looked it over. Behind her, the men talked.

“I heard screaming, and I just came runnin’” said Carl, who sounded like he’d been sick, and would be again shortly. “I found him just like this… I … I didn’t know who it was at first... thought maybe it was one of the animals to tell truth…” This was followed by quick footsteps and the sound of retching.

“Animals, musta been. Ain’t nothin’ else could do this to a man. I say we start huntin’. Wild dogs, a boar… we’ll find out soon enough.” Louella recognized the voice of Ezra, one of the men who carried a shotgun.

“I say we move on in the morning. Ain’t nothin’ in this town for us but trouble,” said another man.

Poor John lay face down in the dirt. Louella saw that his back had been ripped open, and blood turned the ground around him a muddy black in the dim light. Bits of his innards were spilled out; his skin was tattered and torn. One arm was tossed out from his body, and Louella could see marks on it, round and bloody. They looked too small to be a dog’s bite to her, but she said nothing.

It was John’s head that was the worst. The back of his skull was like a dented can, his hair matted with blood, bits of bone clinging like maggots.

“Lester, bring that torch closer,” Louella asked quietly. Lester stepped toward her and swung the torch down. Louella leaned in and looked closely at the back of John’s head. Inside the great, gaping wound there was nothing but shadow.

Louella stood, and faced the crowd. She took a breath and said “Brain’s gone. I think we gotta zombie.”         

The commotion took more than a few minutes to die down. Eventually, Louella got everyone’s attention.

“We gotta get him burnt,” she said, “before he rises.”

Louella wasn’t sure John would ever actually rise, but it got people moving. She set three of the dancing girls, and the strongest hands to help them, to building a funeral pyre for John. Soon she was left with just Lester, Ezra, who still carried the shotgun, and Saul, who was Ezra’s constant companion.

“Ezra, you and Saul gotta track this thing.” She said. “When you find it, you gotta shoot it in the head. Gotta destroy the head or it’ll just keep coming at you. Can you do that?”

Chests puffed, and Louella was assured that they could, of course, do that.

“Good,” she said. “Now, zombies, I heard they don’t like the light, and they don’t like people. I think this one’ll head off away from us, far as it can get.” Louella pointed across the fields toward the distant woods. “Head off that way, and keep an ear out. Wait until you can see it coming at you, ’cause you’ll only get one shot. Stay together, ’cause you won’t be takin’ a torch. He’ll be afraid of a torch.”  Ezra and Saul looked for a moment like they might salute, and then headed straight for the woods. Louella and Lester watched them go. After a moment, Lester asked “Louella, the zombie didn’t go that way, did it?”

“Nope,” said Louella. “I reckon that they can’t get in trouble in the dark in the woods, though. They’ll find their way back when the sun comes up. Now, c’mon, Lester. I’m gonna need your help.”

Louella took Lester to the canteen, where she borrowed a good sized meat cleaver and some salt, and to the tool trailer, where she pulled out a long, sharp machete and handed it to Lester.

“I think, if I were a zombie who hadn’t been fed in awhile, I’d go for the easiest meal I could find,” Louella said. “I think John just was in the wrong place, right then. This zombie got loose, his master couldn’t control him, and he’s hungry, and the first thing he sees is John, standing there like an food pantry for the dead. But now he’s got something in his belly, and he’s thinking a little clearer, and he’s gonna go find him something a little safer to make a meal of.”

Lester and Louella had made their way to the animal pens. Horses shied nervously. A portable shed on wheels rocked, buffeted by a herd of excited goats and sheep.

“Louella, the chickens!” said Lester.

Louella looked, and sure enough the chickens were in their pen, holding unbelievably still for a flock of birds. Louella looked closer and saw that the chickens were missing their heads, which would account for their quietude. There was a rustle inside the hen house, and then a muffled thump.

“Lester, you walk right behind me, now,” said Louella.

“I’m going in first, Louella. It’s only right.”

Louella stopped and stared at Lester. “This ain’t no time for arguing. I’ve got the salt, and I’m smaller. I’ll go in first and blind him with the salt, then git out the way. You come in right behind me and soon as I move, start swinging that machete. Got it, Lester?”

Lester nodded, reluctantly. “All right. Just move quick, y’hear?”

Louella walked toward the hen house. She stepped nimbly over the hip high wire fence, pushing it down so it didn’t catch her robe. Lester was right behind her, as promised.  The hen house rocked back on its two wheels, threatening to roll over the shims that kept it in place. Inside there was another thud, and then a muffled squawk, which cut off very abruptly.

Louella reached the door, took a deep breath to steady herself and nearly retched. The reek of chicken was nearly overpowered by blood and death, and a whiff of something a little ranker, like an open grave. She reached in to her pocket of salt and took out a handful, grasped the door knob with the other hand, and shoved the door open. Louella stepped in to the room throwing salt before her, then jumped aside, back against the wall so Lester could enter.

The zombie turned toward the opening door, but Louella’s aim was good. The salt landed in the creatures eyes, blinding it. The salt fell, too, in to open scratches and sores on the creature’s arms and face, which Louella reckoned would sting like madness whether a body were living or dead.

Then, suddenly, the creature was coming at them, and Lester was swinging his blade. It came down at an awkward angle, between the shoulder and the neck. The zombie squealed and then roared, then tried to grab Lester with its good arm. Lester ducked out of the way, still tugging furiously on the machete, which was stuck fast. Louella threw more salt from behind Lester, and the zombie reeled back again, this time pulling itself off the blade with a sickening suck of bone and gristle. The momentum carried Lester back until he fetched up against the wall. Louella stepped forward, and this time the salt landed in its mouth. The zombie clawed at its throat, then fell to its knees, ripping at its chest as the salt slid down it’s gullet.

Lester watched white faced and tight lipped, the machete clutched in bloodless knuckles. He glanced at her, and she nodded.

Lester’s arm swung up, and back down with one smooth slice. This time he went through the neck and into the bone. The zombie collapsed on the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Lester put his foot on the zombie’s shoulder for leverage, and pulled the blade out. A line of dark slime ran down the length of it, spewing back over the wall as Lester raised his arm again. This time the machete came out the other side, the head falling free of the body in a wash of black bile and gristle. The machete stuck in the floor, and Lester left it there.

Louella was first out the door. The zombie was dead, and she felt she had earned the right to be as sick as she liked. She held on to a fence post while what little was in her stomach came up. Lester crouched beside her, panting.

“What now, Louella?” He asked. Louella looked at him, and saw that he was shaking and clammy.

Louella wiped her mouth on the hem of her robe, and then moved over to Lester. She patted his hand awkwardly, and then lifted it and held it between her own. She touched his face, cupping his cheek like a child.

“Now, we burn it.”

It didn’t take long for word to spread through the carnival when Lester and Louella came back to the big top dragging the chicken coop. Louella asked some of the men to bring water, in case the fire got out of hand. About the time they lit the hen house, Ezra and Saul wandered out of the woods. They were in a fury at first, not liking having been tricked. Lester glared at them, and said something soft, and they got to work filling water buckets.

When the hen house was nearly coals, they moved John on top of it and added wood underneath and started all over again. Well in to the afternoon the fire finally died out. After the ashes cooled Louella stomped them down and covered them with salt.

No one ever came looking for their missing zombie, and the carnival moved on the next day. Louella went back to singing, dancing and mostly fortune telling, and Lester went back to fixing things that were broke around the carnival. If it seemed a lot of things broke and needed fixing around Louella, well, no one mentioned it.

At night sometimes, after her show, Louella would stand under the stars and smoke her pipe. She’d look hard in to the shadows, and catch the eye of the zombies waiting there for their masters, and she’d nod her head toward them.

“Just so’s we understand each other,” she’d murmur. “Just so’s.”

runners-up

the final days of the state Of New Hampshire

by Carlton C. Powers

I could have written a history of the world but I did not. God wrote the history of the beginning, and your ancestors ignored that. Men wrote the history of the middle, and they ignored that, too. John wrote the history of the ending, and by the time they were paying attention to him, it was all too late. No, what I have written has never been read, and what I have to say has never been heard.

Today, child, I will tell you what I have promised to tell. Not the multitudes of stories passed down by your ancestors, but the one they have forgotten. You shall know about the last democracy, for which neither angels nor devils kept sturdy the pillars of faith in the halls of government. Today, I shall the story of the place I loved most, and I shall tell how it was lost to evil, so that you might better understand the nature of that which is no longer.

It was in 1795, in France, when I met a man named Thomas Paine. I flew to him in his cell during his darkest moments, and he spoke to me of a great land across the sea where the people were ruling themselves. When I came there, when I read their constitution, I knew I had to stay.

Years pass. It is now 2035, at Harvard University, and here our story begins. A man once said “All science and no philosophy makes Jack a dangerous boy.” Well, Herman was a dangerous boy, very dangerous. Herman H. Webbards was a Harvard University researcher. I read about his work once, and decided that I must meet him immediately. Of course, he was surprised to see a bird speaking to him. But he was fascinated also, just as I was fascinated by him. It seems he had found a way to reanimate human bodies after their death. They would walk around at his command, stiff, mindless automatons. He showed me the amazing things he could do by hollowing out a human skull.

He was an idealist. He thought the creatures could be used for cheap labor. He had wild visions of a world where no man would have to sit at a computer or work behind a counter, where people would become obsessed by artistic and intellectual pursuits. But it was not to be.

His wild bragging in the academic world had attracted unwelcome attention. Since the beginning, Massachusetts had been the chosen land of Satan. When the first white men landed there they quickly found themselves ringed by pagan conspiracies. You may have read about the Salem witch trials? God sent his most devout followers, the Puritans, and even they could not drive evil from that land.                     

Many years passed until I traveled there. By that time, with the oppressive taxes and the oppressive laws, most citizens had fled to the north, some to the land of Maine, most to the land of New Hampshire. But the evil ones remained. Years before, the city to the south had been shattered by colorless fire sent from the land of Muhammad. Boston had become the world’s Babylon, and now all the nations of the world were drunk from its wealth.

When the pagan forces heard about the research this man was doing, they came to him. When he proved unwilling to bargain, the university was attacked by witches and warlocks, and a battle ensued for its possession. It was, of course, nothing the police couldn’t control, but they could not arrive in time to stop the evil ones from seizing Herman’s specimens. They continued his experiments, finding ways to bring intelligence to the creatures, to subjugate them to their commands.

It would have easily ended there, but that the beast then made his move. For he had been hiding many years I suspect, in the person of the once great Emperor Romney. Lucifer revealed himself then, and his followers gathered with their shadowed books. They found that the powers their books had told them about were strengthening and soon countless peoples rallied to their banner. They might have been crushed by military forces, but soon the vampires, the werewolves, the dragons and the other creatures which had been hiding since the printing of the Gutenberg, rose up, and rallied to their command. Massachusetts was easily seized.

Oh how they cut wide swaths of destruction across the world, but the land of New Hampshire, only just north of the center of evil, survived their onslaught yet. For in the land of New Hampshire, the people had maintained their sanity. Under the institution of their wiser government, that did oppress its innocent citizens with high taxes.

When Satan banned the teaching of free market economics, the teachers and professors from around the world fled to the town of Durham. When he declared that the property be divided, the businessmen from around the world fled to the capital at Concord. When he declared dissension and resistance unacceptable, the radicals and free thinkers fled to the city of Portsmouth. And it was finally, when he banned happiness, that the artists from the world round came to Dover.

Finally, after years of trying to threaten, coerce, divide and conquer New Hampshire, the beast sent his legions to destroy the whole of it. The “zombies,” as they called them, came swiftly upon the Hamptons, which were unprepared. The people did not know they could walk on the bottom of the seas.

The town of Portsmouth was nearly taken, but for the town’s public library (which they had foolishly thought of moving away from the town center years earlier). There, the citizens discovered that throwing dusty old books at the zombies caused them to savagely disintegrate. Books, child, would save New Hampshire’s people from destruction. Do you know the library in New Jerusalem? The one that is stacked full of books? Well, that is the legacy of the people of New Hampshire, for whom libraries had always been important. They were resisting the government when it decided that books ought to be destroyed. They drove away the book burning Midwesterners when they came to tear down the shelves and erect monuments in their place.

Yet the undead kept coming into the city. It was only when some of the men in Kittery decided they could save the town by riding a submarine out of the bay. The thickly hulled vessel crashed against the hordes of underwater zombies, washing them all to sea. I remember, ironically, that that government, which had become so wicked in its final years, had tried to destroy the submarine base as well.

Nonetheless, the day was saved, and the people celebrated. The only significant damage had been at the at the Press Room, where zombies broke in screaming about tasty food, and the Mustard Seed, which the witches had raided for supplies. They were at the Post Office, too, but it was not a loss. I remember the words of a minister the next day, who declared prophetically “God unleashed his unbridled wrath on the incompetency of our postal service, has called us to use the Federal Express in its place!"

I am sorry, child, for I can see from your shaking and trembling that I seem to have scared you. I apologize. You see, the youth of this new world are not like the youth I am used to. The youth used to love stories and tales, they used to be much less sensitive to violence. I suppose even paradise has its downside.

There was no way they could really win. Even in the first few weeks of the war, the government in Concord agreed that it needed to begin evacuating people to the safety of the Seacoast You see, humans could not control the vast expanses between their libraries. In some towns, the witches and warlocks descended on dragons and even burned the libraries. I must admit, I am not like the inhabitants of this new world. I was captivated and fascinated by the scenes of violence.

You see, I have been there at all the important moments in warfare. When David defeated Goliath, I was watching. When heavy cavalry mowed down Roman legions, I was watching. When Lee was charging at the trenches of Gettysburg, when the revolutionaries in Russia overthrew the tzar, when the tanks were storming over the German trenches, and when the planes battled off Midway, always, it was my duty to watch.

But you see, this war surprised me so much. Never before had I seen anti-aircraft guns blazing away at swooping dragons. Never before had I seen magic spells and zombies raging against bullets and old books. I think the fighting there was so intense the air itself was in danger. And if you had seen what was happening to the conquered places, even you would lose your innocence.

I remember when the armies of slaves marched on the southern cities, the great battles that raged between the dead and the living. I remember seeing Nashua, which was too near to the border, consumed by the fighting. I remember the people desperately trying to stay alive to see the final days.

When they came to Dover, their zombies crawled along the bottoms of the Cocheco. For the soldiers near the fish ladder, it was too late. What a horrific sight it was, zombies breaking into Jewelry Creations, overturning tables at the Café on the Corner, although they met no resistance at Dover Soul. And then they broke into Nicole’s and walked out with every greeting card in the land. They wrote obscene messages on the cards, and left them to rot everywhere. The noble keepers of Earcraft vainly threw their last books of sheet music at the advancing hordes, but the zombies took the instruments there and learned to play the drums (as any plebeian might).

What is this, child? You have never heard of a drum? I am not surprised. It is a good thing that the world should have no drummers. In past days, they were the sort that lived with their mothers, the mere mortals dwelling among the immortal true musicians.

And in Durham, they destroyed the university. It was a mighty battle, raging from room to room, student and teacher one and the same in struggle. Zombies murdered the Wildcat team at a hockey match, and skated out onto the ice to the horror of the audience, brandishing machine guns. I think most of the fans escaped on the train, but the places one could hide were running out.

The sights of horror were many, child. The people of New Hampshire were persecuted, persecuted because they refused to surrender to evil. It was Portsmouth, child. There, they gathered for the end. They gathered to them all the ships that could be procured and fled from the zombied shores of the New World. This was the last time, I think, that people would control their own destiny. In the whole world, only one state remained now that respected the free man and the free economy. They would flee there to Jerusalem, a land decidedly free of the zombies and decidedly free from Massachusetts. And so they stood on the ships, steaming into the sunrise.
Happy Halloween
by Kiarna Boyd

Robert peered through the window at the passing crowd. The laughing, costumed children and waving,  masked adults in the Halloween parade caused him to shiver and lean away from the window. Dropping the blinds, he pressed himself flat against the wall of his darkened apartment and tried to erase the images in his mind. Having never sampled recreational drugs, the disturbing images he had seen were wrought by the sheer power of fear. The tiny face of a 5-year-old painted to look like a cat seemed to waver into the ghoulish likeness of a drooling beast straight out of a nightmare. He took a deep breath and forced himself to look out the window again at the passing line of Halloween celebrants.  An attractive woman handing out candy looked up, and Robert saw the shimmer of rotting flesh under her vampire makeup.

Gagging, he hurried to the bathroom, where he promptly threw up his light dinner. He summoned up his happy thoughts while he brushed his teeth over the sink. Memories of kittens playing in piles and warm rays of golden sunlight drifting through green leaves played through his mind as he tried to stop shaking. He kept the mental images brief to prevent his imagination from corrupting them.