The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten Read Free

of shiny-haired newspeople were talking with serious looks on their faces, and there was some kind of text crawling across the bottom of the screen, but Otto couldn’t make it out because he’d left his glasses in the truck. He was only forty-two and never needed glasses before and while he’d let Barbara convince him to wear them for driving after he nearly ran down the Munck boy he wasn’t about to go around in public, not with those frames Barbara picked out. They were blue and kinda square-looking. Who did she think he was, some kind of rock and roll star?
    The screen switched to some kind of star map and Otto figured they were talking about the big meteor shower last night. The sky lit up enough to wake him but not Barbara, who could probably sleep through the end times and the Rapture and a four-piece swing band set up right in her nightstand, because who could hear anything over her snoring anyway? Otto had gone to the window but by then the big light was gone and it was just a bunch of shooting stars, pretty enough but what it came down to was rocks falling out the sky and that wasn’t much good to anybody so he went back to bed.  
    Julie came in from the back and topped up their coffee. She was a pretty girl in her early thirties with ice-blue eyes and an aggressive chest that she pointed at you to make you tip more than was healthy or necessary, and Otto tried not to notice how tight her waitress uniform was, though he half-thought it was on purpose. “Heard on the radio this morning about some kind of riot in the Cities,” she said.
    “Ish,” Ingvar said. He was seventy and looked a hundred, and even though he wore patched bib overalls everybody knew he was sitting pretty, having turned his already-successful family farm into an even more lucrative sand and gravel quarry. Otto didn’t think it was right shipping off so much of the town’s land, since land wasn’t something you could get back, but Ingvar’d bought a new scoreboard for the high school baseball team so you couldn’t say he wasn’t generous, though he could’ve tried a little harder to be anonymous about it. Just asking for the gift to be anonymous wasn’t enough. Word got around. Made people uncomfortable to be around him, since you were afraid he might be afraid you might ask him for money, as if you would, that’d be the day.  
    “Everybody’s always upset about something.” Otto sipped the coffee, which wasn’t as good as in the days when Julie’s grandfather did the brewing, but it was hot, and since winter was just getting underway hot was the important thing. “Probably too many people trying to get a talking muppet doll for their kids, that kind of thing, people forget the true meaning of the holidays.”
    “It’ll blow over soon, whatever it is,” Julie said. “Too cold to be out on the street making a fuss anyway.”
    “Yep.” Ingvar hunched a little more over his coffee as if to warm himself, probably thinking of that big, cold, empty farmhouse of his out on the edge of the prairie, his children moved away, wife dead these fifteen years, and all his farmland transformed into pretty much a great big hole in the ground where there used to be gravel and where there was, now, just empty space and some iced-up black water. Otto was a farm equipment salesman, not a farmer himself, but he knew it took a special kind of used-up old and tired to turn your back on the land that had sustained your family for generations and let a company come in and rip the land up to spread on driveways and road projects. Ingvar might have gotten a little richer out of the deal but Otto wondered what he did with himself all day now.  
    The bell over the door jingled, and Otto hunched instinctively against the blast of winter cold that came bursting into the diner. He wasn’t about to spin around on his stool to see who’d come in, but the look on Julie’s face was enough to make him twist a little and glance back, casually, as if