The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten Read Free Page B

always been excitable, ever since seminary, but “excitable” usually meant getting worked up about the Twin’s chances at the pennant or the sorry state of the offering plate these days or how short skirts were getting every summer, wasn’t it shameful, like to make a man lose his mind.  
    Only now Eddie was yelling about the End Times and the Rapture and other things that, generally speaking, Lutherans didn’t put much stock in, since if you actually sat down and looked at the Scripture there wasn’t much to support the idea of a time of tribulation and the Antichrist becoming president and legalizing gay marriage and marrying the Pope and carving 666s and swastikas and bar codes into people’s foreheads. Eddie had a Southern wife and Daniel supposed she’d been gradually filling him up with Pentecostal hellfire and brimstone over the years and, for whatever reason, it all came bubbling up today. Eddie usually called to talk sports and complain about the challenges of ministering to a flock in St. Paul and to wax nostalgic about their time in the seminary when they’d talked more about theology and the calling and wrestling with matters of faith and less about bake sales and choir robes and Christmas pageants. Now he was talking about the dead rising to smite the unbelievers.
    “Now when you say the dead are rising,” Daniel finally said, “am I to take that as some kind of metaphor?”
    “No, Daniel, you’re to take it as me saying that dead people are wandering the streets and attacking anyone they can reach and when people run away and slip on the ice and fall the dead people fall on them and start trying to eat them. And it’s not just people. I saw a run-over dog start dragging itself around even though it had a tire tread mark right across its belly, snapping at people. It’s the end times, Daniel! But there’s no Christ taking us into heaven! The Lord swore he’d never destroy the Earth with a flood again, and most people assumed that meant next time it would be fire, but it’s not fire, it’s just teeth !”
    “Okay then,” Daniel said. “So you give Pearl my love then.”
    “You think I’m crazy, don’t you.” Eddie’s voice had gone hoarse and quiet. “I’m locked in my office, afraid to come out, because we were having a memorial service here and the corpse sat up in the coffin and took a bite out of his great-granddaughter’s throat. I’m calling you up to warn you. For gosh, Daniel, don’t you have any dead people in Lake Woebegotten? Step on a cockroach or something and watch it come back to life if you don’t believe me!”
    “A lotta guys in a situation like that might call the police,” Daniel said.
    “You think I haven’t tried? The lines are jammed. You call 911 and you don’t even get a busy signal, you just get a drone . It started last night, did you see it, the shooting stars? I thought I might talk about it in my Christmas sermon in a couple of weeks, about how it reminded me of the star that heralded the birth of Christ, but I think it heralded the coming of the Anti christ, it… you… no time to… before it’s…”
    “Eddie?” Daniel said, but the connection turned to fuzz and squeals and static. He sighed and dialed Eddie’s home number, hoping to catch Pearl and let her know her husband could use a visit right about now, and was maybe a mite under the weather, but he just got a recording saying all lines were busy.  
    After thinking for a while, Daniel went down to the church basement/rec room/storage area, checked to see that no one else was around, and slid aside the eye-wrenchingly painted backdrop from a never-to-be-repeated vacation bible school performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat . That revealed a concealed door that led to a corridor cut into the living rock, though he’d never really understood the term “living rock,” since rock was neither alive nor dead, and saying “living rock” seemed kind of animistic or