Opening Night of the Dead

By Blake Petit

The Climax Studios Festival of Fear is a Halloween tradition, but with monsters roaming the theme park and a monster movie filming on the adjacent film lot, what hell will break loose when a real zombie surfaces and starts biting? When you can't tell who's alive and who's undead, can a stuntman, a makeup artist, a sleaze-slinging blogger and a pair of former cops stop the end of the world from sneaking off the studio lot and infecting all of California?

Blake M. Petit's first zombie novel brings the sharp wit and genre-aware humor of his superhero favorite OTHER PEOPLE'S HEROES to the realm of horror. Fast, tense, and fun, OPENING NIGHT OF THE DEAD is a zombie tale unlike any other.

For more information, visit the author online at
www.EvertimeRealms.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blake Petit
• Release date: Jun 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476094885

Blake Petit

Blake M. Petit is a freelance writer, columnist, reviewer, podcaster, actor, director, teacher, and unlicensed tree surgeon from Ama, Louisiana. He is the author of the novels Other People’s Heroes and The Beginner, as well as the podcast novel A Long November. His weekly comic book column, Everything But Imaginary, has appeared Wednesdays at comiXtreme.com since 2003. In January of 2007 he joined with his longtime friend Chase Bouzigard to host the weekly 2 in 1 Showcase comic book podcast, appearing every weekend at comiXtreme. Blake is a member of the board of directors of the Thibodaux Playhouse theatre company in Thibodaux Louisiana, where his original stage play The 3-D Radio Show was produced in 2004. In a former life as a newspaper editor, his weekly Think About It column won the Louisiana Press Association Award for best column in 2001. In his free time, he teaches high school English, which at the moment pays better than the rest of his more impressive-sounding endeavors put together.

Book preview

Opening Night of the Dead

Blake M. Petit

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Blake M. Petit

Other fiction by Blake M. Petit:

The Beginner

A Long November and Other Tales of Christmas

The tales of Siegel City:

Other People’s Heroes

The Restless Dead of Siegel City

Lucky Penny

The Obligatory Everything But Imaginary:

A Revolving Door in Heaven

Acknowledgements

Unlike many of you reading this, I actually didn’t grow up watching horror movies or reading horror novels. My parents (wisely, considering how neurotic I turned out to be) didn’t expose me to scary movies at an early age, and by the time I was old enough to decide for myself what movies I wanted to watch I thought the antics of slashers and monsters looked too silly to waste my time with. So credit for this book has to go to the three people most responsible for turning my opinion of horror around, in chronological order:

For my Uncle Todd, who made me read Stephen King’s The Stand in high school before the TV miniseries premiered.

My old friend Jason Champagne, who got me to watch my first few slasher flicks in college and helped me to see the fun behind the faux scares.

The love of my life, Erin Blash, who helped me to grow to appreciate zombies in particular. The ghouls in this book owe an obvious debt to George Romero (who never had his zombies specifically target brains, for crying out loud), but if it wasn’t for Erin, I would never have figured that out.

Thanks also to the Legion of Super-Readers, a group of fine folks who took the time out of their own busy schedules to read over this manuscript and make suggestions and changes that make for a cleaner and clearer book, particularly Eric Barrett, Katy McCarthy, Ann Sellers, Kate Smith & Woofer McWooferson.

And finally to my sister, Heather Keller, whose artwork again graces the front cover of this book. Some of the thanks is allotted for the artwork itself, the rest for putting up with my gentle nudges and reminders over the last few months to please finish it so I could actually release this book into the wild.

PROLOGUE

If he knew the crap he was in for after he died, Josh Cambre would have made a more concerted effort to stay among the living.

He wandered the Halloween Festival of Fear alone, Kelly having abandoned him for a guy in a Conan the Barbarian costume (and not a square of cotton padding necessary to fill out the muscles, either). Josh was dressed as a scarecrow, and like Kelly’s new Conan, he had the physique for his costume. Josh was thin, spindly – even sickly if you looked at him from the wrong angle. To be frank, it was astonishing that a zombie would bother to bite somebody with so little meat on his bones. Then again, it was just his luck to run afoul of the only member of the undead in the world busy counting Weight Watchers points. He hadn’t encountered any real zombies yet, but after his date walked off with the guy in the loincloth, he lost most of his inclination to keep on going. He wasn’t considering suicide or anything – Josh didn’t quite have the steel for that – but if you’d told him there was a flesh-eating ghoul marching around the Climax Studios Amusement Park, he wouldn’t necessarily have made an effort to flee in terror.

Wandering the park alone, not knowing or particularly caring if Kelly would have a ride home with her Cimmerian king, he decided to force himself to have a good time. This would have been a brilliant idea, had it proven even remotely possible. The roller coaster was a bust (literally, it broke down with three people remaining in line ahead of him), and the last time he’d gone on a Tilt-a-Whirl he’d been left with three days of hugging the toilet bowl. Popping into a Haunted House, he decided, would be his safest bet. It was unlikely he’d run into Kelly; if he did he probably wouldn’t recognize her in the dark, and maybe a good scare would wipe the depressed look from his face.

Of course, that was the great thing about the scarecrow costume – the mask covered his entire head. His Coke-bottle glasses fit under there as neatly as his enormous ears, his matted-down haircut was invisible, his acne across the bridge of his too-small nose was as good as clear. No one could even see the small brown blob underneath his chin, the birthmark that his mother always tried telling him looked like a lion, but that people always said looked like he’d been eating chocolate and hadn’t wiped his face well enough.

Chocolate if he was lucky.

Christ, it was amazing that Kelly had even agreed to come here with him in the first place, wasn’t it?

An enormous fiberglass proxy of Frankenstein’s monster was grinning down at him, lightning flashing up into his face and reflecting onto the ground with a strobe effect. Shuffling around outside of the building he saw mummies, werewolves, and slashers aplenty. This was the one he wanted. There were a dozen Haunted Houses on the Climax Studios theme park property, each with its own theme or overlay – Science Gone Bad, Gateway to Hell, Crypt of the Vampires (reportedly the tamest haunt on the property, and oh, how that wounded him). After very little deliberation, Josh decided to soak his sorrows in Silver Screen Screams, a house full of dioramas plucked specifically from classic horror movies – and, no doubt, liberal use of the characters from Climax’s recent horror hit, The Beginner. In fact, he could see one of the bad guys from that movie waiting in the wings – a little bald fella wearing all black and twirling what looked like a surgical scalpel from a leather thong on his left hand. Good job making the little bastard look creepy, if nothing else. He worked with this fright factory. It was good enough for Josh to waste a little time before he dragged himself home.

He was told that actors in a Haunted House are trained to leap at the most terrified-looking person in a group, and in front of him was a giggling mob of teenage girls, each of whom seemed to make for a welcome target when someone was primed to leap out from a casket or reach a mummified arm out from behind a hidden panel in the wall. Since the actors in their monster makeup invariably blew their wads trying to terrify the girls, they were always resetting the scene when Josh walked past on his own a few seconds later. He tried not to focus on the idea that even actors paid to terrify people seemed to have no interest in him at all.

After about 20 minutes in the house, Josh wandered into an area lined with rows of authentic-looking corn stalks, with yellow lights twinkling at him in pairs – eyes watching him from behind the rows. Interesting effect, one that worked pretty well, he thought. It would be better if they tried to shape the lights a little, they were too round to accept as eyes, but he could give the Climax folks an A for Effort. He even felt appropriately dressed here in the cornfield, even though he didn’t actually feel like he fit in any better than he did anywhere else.

A nasty chill whispered across his back when the gurgling sound began, and the zombie that moved out of the cornrows reached out at him, hissing and snapping his teeth. Josh didn’t scream – didn’t even flinch. He just rolled his eyes and said, Dude, I really think you wandered into the wrong scene. You’re supposed to be a creepy-ass kid with platinum blonde hair. Good makeup, though.

He moved to continue after the girls on the path, but the corpse wrapped its claw-like hands around his arm. Josh turned, starting to get angry with the pushy kid in the zombie getup. Look, man–

Whatever threat or ultimatum would have followed was lost when the zombie’s thick, yellow teeth chomped through the burlap shirt that was part of his costume and into the admittedly thin flesh of Josh’s arm. He shouted, yanking the limb back out of instinct, but succeeding only in helping the zombie rip out a chunk of stringy flesh. Blood spurted into the air and dripped from the mouth of the hungry ghoul. Josh screamed again, but still had the presence of mind to back away, flailing, and bolt from the scene.

The arm hurt terribly, not only from the wound, but from an intense burning sensation that seemed to consume the whole area. When he placed his good hand over the wound he was stunned to feel how hot it was already, as if his arm alone could somehow contain a fever.

Oh god, he thought, what if that guy had rabies? What if he had something worse? Those videos, those Curtain guys, what if— What did he give to me?

He rushed ahead into the house, shoving aside the teenage girls (who threw some decidedly un-ladylike language at him, not that he was in any condition to get into a snit about it), and began to wander through room after room, shouting for help. In an Egyptian crypt, he nearly trampled an old woman in a walker. In Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, he actually shoved the Monster himself over into the lab table, eliciting some joyous laughter from the kids Frankie had been attempting to frighten. Finally, he stumbled through the exit door and fell right onto the pavement, rolling to the feet of a little man with a big smile.

Josh looked up at him, seeing someone dressed in all black, which wasn’t exactly unusual at this time of year. The small figure had no hair, but a wide, toothy grin spread across his face like a famished man looking down at a perfectly grilled steak. He held something in his left hand – cradled it, if one was going to be honest – but Josh wasn’t even paying attention, which was the last mistake of his life. Josh was happy to see anyone, even someone dressed like the Closer-monster from The Beginner.

"Dude! There’s someone in there… someone biting people! You gotta call the cops, you gotta–"

Joshua Cambre.

Josh blinked, surprised to hear his name from the lips of this stranger, startled just enough to arrest his panic. I… yeah, that’s me, but…

Eighty-two years old, the little man continued. He reached out with his right hand, grabbing the burlap mask that shielded Josh’s unseemly face from the rest of the Halloween crowd. With one fierce yank, he pulled the mask away, exposing Josh’s skin to the warm autumn air of California. Josh looked up, seeing a horrible gleam in the man’s eye, and suddenly he was far more terrified than he was when it was just the walking dead after him.

You die, the man said. You die alone, from a pulmonary embolism in your sleep, after a tragically lonely and pathetically uneventful life.

"What the hell? Dude, break character! Some asshole bit my arm, you gotta help me!"

The little man raised his hand, and something flashed. Something long and silver.

Don’t worry, he said. I’m about to spare you all that.

CHAPTER ONE

It was almost a comfortable day, like it always was. Slightly overcast, the temperature hovering somewhere between 77 and 80 degrees – a tad warmer than he would have liked it, but not so hot that it was worth complaining about. The newspaper he snagged on his way into the office would be the usual eight-page rag full of news about somebody building a rock garden, a car running out of gas, or the reunion of siblings who hadn’t seen each other in 20 years. Considering the circumstances, the reunion stories were really more depressing than uplifting.

Mister?

A kid was approaching him, spiky ginger hair pointing in all directions, green eyes bulging. He looked terrified, and not just by his own appearance. He was dressed like a swamp creature, complete with a thick rubber suit, heavy rubber scales weighing his limbs down. His rubbery, moss-covered mask dangled from his head, but it had been torn to shreds. The rubber seemed to have been ripped apart, and there were more than a few bite marks all over his body. Lucky for him, Tim knew, those bites wouldn’t be visible when he finally got around to taking the costume off.

What do you want, kid?

The kid pointed to the newspaper in his hand. Is… is it true? Is that gonna tell me about…

You just got here, didn’t you?

The kid nodded, and Tim nodded back. Kid was confused, and Tim didn’t quite blame him. He doubted everybody acclimated as easily as he did.

He looked over at Cookie, the news vendor. He was a vendor from the old school, including a green visor on his head and a crappy cigar wobbling between his lips. Tim didn’t know how long Cookie had been here, but he was sure that the look had been in style when he arrived. Make it two, Cookie.

You got it, Timbo. He handed over a second newspaper, and Tim, in turn, handed it to the kid.

Go ahead and read, son. I know it’s confusing, but you’ll get the hang of it soon enough. My office is in this building right here. You get really messed up in the next day or two, stop by and I’ll help you as best I can.

I don’t understand it. I was at work, at the amusement park, and all of a sudden I got tackled by all these guys in zombie makeup and…

Yeesh. Zombies. And I thought I had it bad.

You…

When I died, son. I’m dead. Just like you.

Tim swatted the swamp monster on the shoulder with his newspaper and marched off to the office, flipping the newspaper open as he rode the elevator up. There were only two sections of the paper that were of any interest to him at all: Arrivals and Departures. On Earth, it would be the equivalent of births and deaths. Tim Fenton only read the Arrival and Departure sections for the same reason people read the announcements and obituaries back home: to see if any of the names belonged to people he knew. He’d been a cop back on Earth, and he knew his mother had done this same dance day after day, looking for his own name. He had always laughed it off back then, reminding her that if he bought it she would learn about it from Casey, from the chief, from anybody but the obit section of the Times, but he wondered just how she’d felt when the day finally came and his name turned up in that column.

Tim had never been afraid of dying, but if he had known how unbearably tedious the situation after death actually was, he might have. Purgatory was a place where people came to make up for their deficiencies in life, or so the literature claimed, but in the four years he’d been here, Tim had only learned one thing. Purgatory was boring as Hell.

Well, not literally, he supposed. On the whole, he’d rather be in the cosmic waiting room than in the fires of eternal damnation (he assumed – nobody knew anybody who actually experienced Hell and came back to tell the tale), but the part of him that craved excitement when he was alive kept itching the back of his mind, telling him to get his happy ass out of his desk chair and do something, be productive again, dammit. And the bitch of it was, he would comply, he would gladly comply, he ached to comply, except there was nothing for him to do. Every day for four years he’d go out of bed, taken a shower (despite the fact that he never got particularly dirty, sweaty, or smelly), gotten dressed, and marched on down to the office he shared with his partner, Casey King. And every day, he and Casey just sat there, waiting for something to happen that didn’t involve the newspaper or jumble or Casey’s collection of jigsaw puzzles, each of which was missing exactly one piece. Usually, for some reason, a corner.

In the books and the movies, after someone died they always seemed to need convincing about their sudden living-impaired state. There was some theatrical special effects show, or a ghost of a loved one would appear and give them comfort… something along those lines. In Tim’s case, the minute he woke up in the in-between place, ears still ringing from the explosion that killed him, he knew without a doubt that he was dead, and that he hadn’t made it to Heaven or Hell. Casey was there next to him, looking just as bewildered as Tim himself, but neither of them had any doubt about their continued vitality. They were dead, particularly dead in fact, and it was time for them to figure out what to do next.

The world they woke up in was remarkably similar to the one they’d left. People lived in apartments, had jobs (or at least responsibilities) that seemed to correspond to whatever they did when they were alive, and kept on muddling through one mind-numbing day at a time. The problem, Tim thought as he scribbled in a crossword puzzle book, was that in this in-between place there was no goal. Everybody just existed. Nobody got older, nobody got sick, nobody got killed either intentionally or accidentally. You just did what you were supposed to do, quietly and without incident, until whatever cosmic force was in charge decided you’d done enough, and then you disappeared in the night. When your friends realized you were gone they’d throw a little party in your honor, usually with a cake that had good flavor but was a trifle dry, and then they’d get on with their own afterlives, which were no better or worse – and certainly no more informed – for your departure.

Hungry? Casey asked, putting down the handheld video game he’d been fiddling with.

I could eat. What do you feel like?

How does Chinese sound?

Tim nodded in jaded assent and Casey walked over to the refrigerator in the corner of their little office. When he opened up the door, five cartons of food were waiting, all of them piping hot. Tim knew from experience that it wouldn’t be the greatest Kung Pao Chicken he’d ever eaten, but it would be filling and adequate, which may as well have been printed as a slogan on the cover of Purgatory’s tourism brochure. FILLING AND ADEQUATE: DON’T EXPECT EXCELLENCE. WELCOME TO PURGATORY.

People still ate here, even after death, but no one needed to buy food. They opened their cabinets, their stoves, their fridges, and they just found whatever it was they craved waiting, fully prepared. Tim spoke once to someone who had been a chef in life, and he reported that his afterlife task was to work in a massive kitchen, preparing food that was quickly whisked off to some unseen room and taken away. That’s how it was here – nobody ever bothered to explain how things worked, but it wasn’t too hard to put two and two together if you wanted to think about it a little while. The same, of course, went for clothes, supplies, and all other goods that in the living world one needed to acquire from a store. Everyone worked, no money changed hands – evidently, one needed to actually die before you found a society where Socialism worked. There were no stores here, of course, which made Casey once ask what happened to the souls of those who worked in retail on Earth. Tim, who had spent two high school years working at Wal-Mart before moving on to the Police Academy, theorized that they all went straight to Heaven, having paid their Light Debt before their ticket got punched.

Tim and Casey, back on Earth, had been homicide detectives and partners. They always did what Tim had thought was a pretty good job before they both got killed working the same case. After that, it was hard to feel like a success. They’d tried their best, but there was no way to spin a case where two cops were taken out at the same time in what Casey could only describe as a remarkably stupid way to die. They woke up, as everyone in Purgatory did, in the building they called an Entry Center – a long hall full of obsidian-colored cylindrical chambers that kept cycling open and popping out souls that just finished up their run on Earth. From the sheer volume, Tim quickly deduced that most people wound up here first, not being good enough to go up or bad enough to go down.

Casey died first and arrived first, but was still stumbling around the Entry Center in a daze a few minutes later. When Tim fell out of his own chamber, blinking and confused, Casey was standing beside him, opening and closing his eyelids like he’d been asleep for ages, and asked if Tim’s death had been as moronic as his own. The answer, Tim was ashamed to admit, was yes. Together, they left the center and walked into the endless city that seemed to make up their afterlife.

An hour after they made it to Purgatory, Tim found their names on the placard of an office building, identifying the two of them as private detectives. It was close enough to what they did when they were alive, Tim decided, even though it wasn’t strictly accurate. Together they entered the building (a key for which Casey found in his pocket) and found a small office with a pair of desks, a couch, and a refrigerator. Sparse, but functional. At the beginning, considering that they were both dead, things weren’t too bad.

That’s when everything started to go downhill.

Each person in Purgatory was assigned a job when they got there, although as far as they could tell, it was simply to give them something to do during the perpetually bland hours. There was food to cook here, clothes to sew, streets to clean, even people who needed instruction, giving much-needed tasks to the many teachers who wound up here, denied entry to Heaven mainly for harboring destructive urges regarding former students. But there were no crimes to solve. The assumption, if you wound up in this place, was that your ultimate goal was to be good enough to get into Heaven. Why would you screw that up by going around killing people? The result was a crime rate that would have made any police chief on Earth giddy with pride, but it made the job of a homicide detective redundant.

This was, of course, all assumption. Purgatory came with no instruction manual, although they did get to speak with a guide of sorts. Even the name, Purgatory, was unofficial. The guides, the authority figures, never called it that, but it was the closest thing to a description of this place anybody could provide.

Casey, as he always did, opened up his carton of shrimp fried rice and emptied half of it into the carton of Mandarin Chicken, mixing the two dishes together before taking a bite. Why the hell they don’t just put these two together in the restaurant is beyond me, Timbo, I swear.

You know, I’m starting to think your filthy-ass mouth is the reason we’re still here.

Ha. Want some?

I’ll stick with my Kung Pao, thanks.

You know why I like this stuff so much, Tim?

No, Casey, Tim said. It was a lie – Casey had told him this same thing roughly once a month since they first arrived in Purgatory, but retelling his stories was one of the few joys in Casey’s life. Tim hoped that the small amount of satisfaction he was giving his partner was enough to counteract the stain of the falsehood, otherwise he may be here for a very long time.

I was allergic to shrimp when I was alive, Casey said,