This story is a sequel to one that appeared in the first The Living Dead anthology. In “The Skull-Faced Boy,” Dustin and Jack, two recent college grads, die in a car accident and rise as intelligent zombies. Dustin-called “the skull-faced boy” due to his injuries-organizes hordes of mindless zombies into an army and declares war against the living, while Jack becomes his reluctant accomplice. Their rivalry over a girl named Ashley eventually leads Dustin to carve off her face as well.
When “The Skull-Faced Boy” appeared on the Pseudopod horror podcast, it was very well received, and several listeners requested more material set in the same universe. So it was in the back of Kirtley’s mind for a while to possibly expand the story into something longer. When I told him I was editing The Living Dead 2, I encouraged him to submit a sequel story.
“This is the first sequel I’ve written, and it’s hard,” Kirtley says. “For a long time I was stuck, since by the end of ‘The Skull-Faced Boy’ the conflicts and agendas of the characters are all pretty much on the table. My big break came when I considered creating a new main character, Park. And so as not to repeat myself, I made him completely different from my original protagonist, Jack. Jack is an ordinary young man, sensitive, kind of a doormat type, whereas Park is a very, very dangerous soldier.”
Park watched from his car as a pickup screeched to a halt in front of the supermarket. He’d known they would come. The armies of the living were on the march, and the living needed food.
The pickup’s doors flew open and two figures leapt out-a black man and a blond woman. The man, who was older, maybe forty, carried a shotgun. He sprinted toward the store and the woman ran close behind him, her hands wrapped tight around a large silver pistol. The man threw open the entrance doors and vanished into the darkness while the woman waited outside, keeping watch. Smart. But it would not save them.
Park slipped from his car, his scoped rifle clutched to his chest. He crept forward, using abandoned cars as cover. Finally he lay down on the asphalt and leveled his rifle at the pickup.
A dead man in a green apron wandered around the side of the building. He spotted the woman, groaned exultantly, and stumbled toward her, his arms outstretched. The woman took aim at his forehead.
Park pulled the trigger at the same moment she did. The report of her pistol drowned out the soft pinging that his round made as it drilled a neat hole through her pickup’s gas tank. The dead man’s skull smacked against the pavement, and the woman lowered her gun. She didn’t notice the gas pooling beneath her truck.
Park sneaked back to his car and got in. He waited, watching as the woman took down several more of the moaning dead who strayed too close. Later her companion emerged, pushing a loaded shopping cart. The woman hurriedly tossed its contents into the bed of her truck while the man dashed to the store again. This was repeated several times. The commotion attracted an ever-growing audience of moaners, which the woman eyed nervously.
Finally the man and woman leapt into their vehicle and peeled out. The pickup careened across the parking lot, and the dead men who staggered into its path were hurled aside or crushed beneath its tires.
Park donned his black ski mask, pulled his goggles down over his eyes, and started his car. He tailed the pickup along the highway, keeping his distance. When the truck rolled to a stop, he pulled over too and got out.
The man and woman fled from their vehicle and into a nearby field, which was crawling with the dead. Park followed them through the grass and into the woods. He watched through his scope as the pair expended the last of their ammo and tossed away their guns, and then they stood back to back and drew machetes against the clusters of moaners who continued to stumble from the trees all around.
Park approached, using his rifle to pick off the nearby dead men. One shot to each head, cleanly destroying each brain-what was left of them.
He pointed his rifle at the living man and shouted, “Drop it.”
The man shouted back, “Who are you? What do you want?”
Park shifted his aim to the woman and said, “Now. I only need one of you alive.”
“Wait!” the man said. “Damn it.” He tossed his machete into the brush. “There. Okay?”
“And you,” Park told the woman. She hesitated, then flung her weapon away as well.
Park said, “Turn around. Kneel. Hands on your heads.”
They complied. Park strode forward and handcuffed them both. “Up,” he said. “Move.”
The pair stood, and marched. The woman glanced back at Park.
“Eyes front,” he ordered.
She gasped. “Oh my god.” To the man she hissed frantically, “He’s one of them! The ones that can talk.”
The man turned to stare too, his face full of terror.
“Eyes front!” Park shouted.
The man and woman looked away. After a minute, the woman said quietly, “Are you going to eat us?”
“I don’t intend to,” Park said.
“So why do you want us?” she asked.
“It’s not me that wants you,” Park answered.
“Who does then?” the man demanded.
For a long moment Park said nothing. Then he removed his goggles, exposing dark sockets and two huge eyeballs threaded with veins. He yanked off his ski mask, revealing a gaping nose cavity, bone-white forehead and cheeks-a horrific skull-visage.
“You’ll see,” he said.
As dusk fell Park drove down a long straight road that passed between rows of corn. In the fields, dead men with skull faces wielded scythes against the stalks.
“Crops,” said the man in the back seat. “Those are crops.”
Beside him the woman said, “What do the dead need with food?”
“To feed the living,” Park answered.
For the first time her voice held a trace of hope. “So we’ll be kept alive?”
“Some are, it would seem,” Park said.
And Mei? he wondered. He just didn’t know.
In front of his car loomed the necropolis, its walls clumsy constructions of stone, twenty feet high. Crews of skull-faced men listlessly piled on more rocks.
The woman watched this, her jaw slack. She murmured, “What happened to your faces?”
Park glanced at her in the rearview mirror. The car bounced over a pothole, and the mirror trembled as he answered, “Faces are vanity. The dead are beyond such things.”
He pulled to a stop before a gap in the stone wall. The dirty yellow side of a school bus blocked his way. He rolled down his window.
From the shadows emerged one of the dead, a guard. This one did have a face-nose and cheeks and forehead-though the flesh was green and mottled. A rifle hung from his shoulder. He shined a flashlight at Park, then at the captives.
“For the Commander,” Park said.
The guard waved at someone in the bus, the vehicle rumbled forward out of the way, and Park drove on through.
The woman said, “That one had a face.”
“That one is weak,” Park snapped. “Still enamored with the trappings of life. And so here he is, far from the Commander’s favor.”
Park drove down a narrow causeway bordered on both sides by chain-link fences. Every few minutes he passed a tall steel pole upon which was mounted a loudspeaker. Beyond the fences, scores of moaners wandered aimlessly in the light of the setting sun. The man and woman lapsed again into silence. Plainly they could see that this army of corpses presented a formidable obstacle to either escape or rescue.
Park remembered the first time he’d come here, almost three months ago, pursuing a trail of clues. Upon beholding the necropolis his first thought had been: The city that never sleeps.