Tapestry of Whispers Session 13
The Zombie Stomp
Oh, everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back.
- Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”
As Daniel and his companions fled the marina, he could sense that the Shroud between the living and the dead was weakening, and the two worlds were drawing closer. Disturbing noises continued to echo from the cemetery, and Daniel knew they probably wouldn't be able to outrun the approaching danger. Graves began to churn and bony hands reached skyward. The bad part, thought Daniel, is that I expected this.
Beth looked back at the cemetery, concerned. "Not again," she said.
"Oh, yes. Again." Daniel tried to push her and Silas faster. “And this time we don’t have Justin’s fire spells for backup.” Beth winced at the reminder of their old friend, but she didn’t say anything more.
The cemetery was between them and the parking lot where they had left Chance’s police car, and besides, Chance had the keys. Beth was obviously thinking of the car as well, and asked “Where’s the cop?”
Daniel shrugged. “Playing for the other team. Again,” he growled, frustrated.
As they fled, the three found themselves in the darkened streets of southern Monroe. Once an upper-class neighborhood, white flight and the loss of several key businesses had drastically reduced its fortunes. Many of the homes were in poor condition, although just as many showed the stubborn pride of the area's homeowners in their upkeep. Still, for every well-kept property, there were two or three boarded-up houses or empty storefronts.
As they tried to sneak down the street, they came upon a group of neighborhood residents sitting on the front porch of a reasonably well-kept house. They were smoking, drinking beer, and talking about a recent Saints game. One of them spotted Daniel with his tree root bar and shouted, "Hey, man, that's some pig sticker!"
A screeching and roaring sound echoed from the cemetery. The sound of splitting wood and rattling chains added to the horror. "Hey, what the hell is that?" the man asked. The other residents of the neighborhood, alarmed by the sounds coming from the cemetery, turned on their porch lights and peered out from behind their curtains to see what was going on.
Daniel, worried for the group's safety, warned him that they should make tracks because what was back there was not friendly. The man laughed at Daniel's warning, saying, "You don't live down here unless you are ready to fight for what's yours, my brother."
“Well, then,” Beth said. “Let us help you fight for it.”
Daniel turned to the man who seemed to be the most respected among them and asked him to give Beth a gun if they had one, saying, "You won't regret it." The men looked dubiously at Beth as Daniel readied his tree root bar. Ragged figures had broken free from the cemetery and were now stumbling down the street toward the lights. A dense fog from the Underworld followed them. They were entering the neighborhood from all sides, and had already breached many houses. Dogs whined, burglar alarms blared, and guns were already going off. The once-quiet neighborhood was now a war zone.
Daniel pointed to Silas and said, "Get him inside before he soils himself again." The shambling figures drew closer, and their eerie moaning had an immediate effect on the men on the porch. They fled in absolute panic, and Daniel, Beth, and Silas did likewise, not caring where they ran in their terror. Luckily, herd mentality took over and they followed the men deeper into the neighborhood. But the shambling footsteps were gaining fast. The men ran faster, but it was no use. The moaning dead were almost upon them.
“Crap, crap crap!” Beth cried, looking around for something to use as a weapon. The shambling corpses broke into the house on the porch where the group had just been. One resident, a large angry-looking man with a shotgun, rallied the other residents to defend themselves. “Aim for the head,” he shouted
They ran further into the rundown neighborhood, looking for a way out. Daniel looked up and saw one of the corpses reaching out for Beth. She quickly grabbed a random piece of trash and hit the creature in the face with it, but the zombie was unbothered. Daniel's terror had abated, though, and he intoned "Shazam!" as he struck the butt of the root cutter handle to the ground. The sickly green radiance played over the blade again, and he drove the root cutter into the zombie's head. The zombie’s head exploded like a watermelon into smoking shards of goo, and the body immediately collapsed.
The group saw more zombies trying to break into the next block of houses. One of the zombies turned and saw the group fleeing. The lot of them turned and started shambling after the fleeing humans. Running as fast as they could, they looked back to see the zombies were gaining on them. Daniel was horrified to discover that the zombies seemed to coordinate their attacks. They were able to communicate somehow with each other even if all they could do was groan incoherently, and seemed to be able to share information and strategy.
Beth grabbed another improvised weapon and hit the nearest zombie with it, but it wasn't harmed. Daniel hit the zombie with the root cutter and cut off a couple of fingers, but it was still coming. Silas punched another zombie, but that didn't hurt it, though it did get some decayed flesh on his hand. "Ew!" The zombie cracked him on the jaw in return, sending him stumbling back. The zombie Daniel hit with the garden implement flailed at him, but he wasn't hurt by the blow. Another one started a grapple with one of the residents they had followed.
“Don’t let him bite me. Don’t let him bite me!” His friends kicked it away from him. One man produced a handgun and tried to shoot it. The bullet struck the zombie in the chest, but it didn’t even seem to feel it. The zombie backhanded him, and Daniel heard bones snap and saw his head tilt at an unnatural angle. He dropped to the ground and stopped moving, but fortunately he didn’t become a zombie himself. They did not have time to mourn him.
Beth grabbed the man’s gun, declaring “This is more like it.” Two of the zombies crashed onto a porch, and ended up flailing around trying to get out of the railing and disentangle themselves from each other. Daniel managed to decapitate one with his root cutter, but the other one did not seem bothered by the bullets that Beth pumped into it.
Daniel shouted "Aim for the head!" but even with this advice, the corpses proved difficult to destroy. Worse yet, even after taking some of them down, a lot more were on the way and Beth was rapidly running out of bullets.
While fleeing the area, Beth nearly stumbled into an old trash heap that stunk to high heaven. The zombies following them smelled rank enough, but the stench of the trash heap was even worse. The heap began to churn when her foot touched it, and zombified rats began digging their way out, some still struggling with the rat traps that had killed them. The group didn't stick around to see what else might emerge from the trash heap.
Running across a suburban yard, they heard a low growl followed by loud barking. They stopped in their tracks as an angry-looking pit bull approached, its teeth bared and its hackles raised. They were all well within reach of its chain. Beth aimed her commandeered gun at the dog, but Daniel pushed in front of the group, whining like a dog himself. He could hear the creature’s voice in his mind, saying "Intruders! Enemies!"
“Friends,” Daniel told it. “We mean you no harm. Peace.” The dog visibly calmed when Daniel touched its mind, and it moved forward to let him touch its head. Scratching the dog’s ears, he released the chain from its collar. "Bad ones are coming," he warned. "Protect your pack." With a perceptible nod, the dog vanished into the darkness. Behind them, dark figures shambled down the street towards them, forcing them to run again.
Sprinting away from the residential neighborhood they emerged into the bright lights of Desiard Street. The zombies paused in their pursuit, moaning and groaning as if they had encountered an invisible barrier. For a few seconds, they seemed to try to follow, but then they stumbled off into the dark neighborhood instead. Daniel noted that the Shroud felt stronger here. Perhaps that was why the zombies could not follow.
The group fled the zombie-infested neighborhood and made their way down Desiard Street. The scent of pizza baking wafted over them, smelling so good that they all took a deep breath. Soon they came to a building with a colorful sign that read "Nyx's Pizzeria." People were standing outside the building looking toward the sounds of gunfire and screams to their south with some concern. "What's happening down there?" someone asked.
Daniel told the people at the pizzeria that he didn't know what was going on, but that he and his friends had been lucky to get out of the area. After their harrowing experience, the promise of pizza and beer seemed just too good to pass up. The group found a table and ordered some pizza. While they ate, they noticed that the other patrons were strangely silent about the chaos outside. However, Daniel did notice the owner furtively checking a shotgun underneath the bar.
Approaching the bar, he struck up a conversation with the owner. He asked if they often had this kind of trouble in the area. The owner seemed sociable enough and told him that he hadn't seen this level of chaos before, even during the '60s. He did mention that things had been getting strange since "the invasion".
When he expressed confusion about what that was, the bartender told him that after Hurricane Katrina, a lot of what he considered bad people came up from New Orleans, and some of them stayed. The locals called this an invasion, and felt that Monroe had changed for the worse because of it. The bartender grudgingly admitted didn’t think everyone in the neighborhood was a bad element, but he felt there were enough of them that he was concerned about the neighborhood's future.
While Daniel was talking to the bartender, a battered looking West Monroe police cruiser pulled out of the residential zone. Chance Galicinao emerged, looking harried and much the worse for his experience. He seemed surprised to see Daniel and the rest. Stumbling over to their table, he plopped down in a chair and sighed. “What the hell, man? What the actual hell?”
"You were with them," Daniel reminded Chance. "Why don't you tell me what happened?" But Chance just looked at him blankly.
“I was in the marina pursuing those guys, and the next thing I knew I was in my car with those things pounding on the door.” Daniel wanted to ask him if he had seen anything they could use before Blackwood put him under, but didn’t get the chance as the bar suddenly erupted in whoops of joy.
One of the patrons at the bar won at video bingo, and the machine started playing cheerful music and spitting out a huge handful of quarters. The patron shouted, "I won, I won!" and then offered to buy everyone a round of beers. The other patrons were glad to have an excuse to ignore the horrors outside. They seized on the bingo winner's good fortune as an excuse to celebrate and forget. Soon everyone was a little tipsy and more interested in the football game on TV than the events in south Monroe.
“What are they doing,” Beth asked. “It’s like they want to forget. Or ignore it.”
“They aren’t alone,” said one of the neighborhood guys. “I want to forget too. Can’t though. We have to go back and bury Bobby, if he didn’t become one of those things.”
Daniel sympathized with the men. Even the pizza and free-flowing beer did little to erase the memory and smell of what they had just come from. "What's your name?" he asked.
I’m Reginald,” he said. “This is Carter, Vernon, and Pork Chop. You?”
Daniel shook hands with Reginald and his neighbors and introduced himself and Beth. He noticed that Silas seemed uncomfortable around them and wondered why.
“I’m sorry about your friend. He seemed like a good man. I don’t think he turned into one of those things. It doesn’t exactly work like that, thank God. Has anything like this ever happened in your neighborhood before?” Daniel asked.
Reginald admitted that there had been weird happenings in the neighborhood since around the time of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the owners of the old marina over by Grand always seemed okay to him, though, and acted like they really wanted to breathe some life into the neighborhood.
While Daniel was talking to Reginald and his friends, he noticed that Chance was heavily grilling Silas about what happened to Evelyn. Silas was not very forthcoming with information, but he did say that Blackwood had hypnotized Evelyn and told her to go somewhere else just before Boudreaux arrived. Silas also said that Evelyn was not put in one of the coffins, although Drellassi was, for his betrayal. Daniel found Silas's explanation convincing.
The patrons at the bar erupted in cheers as the video bingo machine paid out again. The winner, a regular at the bar, had spent more money buying his friends beer and calzones than he actually won. It seemed as if the machine had a mind of its own, determined to make the patrons forget about the plight of their neighbors. The bar was a popular gathering place for the community, and the patrons were known to be generous. But the video bingo machine seemed to have an almost magical effect on the patrons, making them forget about their troubles and enjoy the moment.
The group left the pizzeria and headed home. As they walked, they could still see many blue and red lights flashing in the distance. The area affected by the zombie rising was bigger than Daniel thought. The smell of gunpowder, smoke, and rotting meat hung heavy in the air, a reminder of the violence that had taken place.
As they trudged along Desiard Street, Daniel tried to ask Thorne what he knew about the Tapestry of Whispers, or Blackwood's operation as a whole. Thorne was less than helpful. "I don't have to tell you anything," he said. "Except this—the Willow can stay burned down for all I care. I'm getting out of this town tonight and I am not coming back!" Daniel didn’t blame him for that’ he sort of wished he could go with him.