The Zombies of Lancaster Read online

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Smiths Killed

  Robin and David Smith signed into the motel along with their two children, Bobby and Gracie, at 10am. They showered. Then, they dressed in casual clothing and left, hoping to catch glimpses of the Amish in Lancaster.

  "We're going to see the Amish, kids!" Robin said. She smiled at the little ones. Lancaster would be an educational vacation for both of them. It was almost like visiting the Bronx Zoo in New York City where they lived.

  "What are the Amish?" Gracie asked.

  "They are strange dudes with big hairy faces," David Smith told her.

  "Hairy faces? What's that?" Gracie asked.

  "Remember Santa Claus last Christmas?" Robin asked Gracie.

  "Sure."

  "It's Santa Claus," her mommy said. "That's a hairy face. They have beards, and they don't drive cars. They drive horse driven carriages. Like little boxes on wheels, dear," Robin said. She looked at her husband, David. "You are scaring her, dear. Little kids have to be carefully told things."

  "Okay," David said. "I forgot. She's sensitive."

  #

  The Smith Family piled into the car which they had rented for the outing. Living in New York City, the Smiths really had no need for an automobile. Just parking one in town cost a fortune. Besides New York buses and trains were the best cheap transportation in the world.

  They passed quaint century homes and businesses and saw a few Amish men sitting in their carriages and discussing the day's events, then headed into the farm lands where the big barns and even older homes were plastered here and there. They were headed toward a small park surrounded by woods where they would have a picnic of ham sandwiches, French fries, and cookies.

  Robin spread the picnic cloth on the ground, and they all settled in for their family meal in the great outdoors. For people from the city, this was a real treat. They saw several Amish taxis go by, pulled by ponies. Many of the men driving them were young and handsome. Two of them waved.

  "It seems very pastoral," David said.

  "Yes. I like it. This is a great place to visit."

  "It's boring," Bobby said. "I'd rather be at school."

  "Wow," David said. "You must really dislike it here, because that's the first time you chose school over anything else. That's very impressive."

  "Yea," Bobby said. He wasn't much of a talker. TV, video games, and computers were most of his lifestyle. Everything else to him was an imposition.

  "Here comes an Amish taxi now," Robin said. "Let's see what he does."

  The taxi turned into the park. They peered at it, hoping to see a bearded man holding the reins, but it looked like the horse was driving the carriage without a man telling it where to go. The taxi veered off the road and parked in the grass about eighty feet away from them.

  "Get ready for fun," Daddy said.

  "Yea. Great fun," Bobby replied.

  "Watch your lip, son," his dad told him. "We came here for you. Remember that."

  "Always," Bobby said. "I'll never forget this."

  "We spawned a smart ass, Robin," Mr. Smith said.

  "At least he has all five fingers. Look on the bright side, dear."

  The cart moved as people inside shuffled about. Then four people emerged out of the front and slowly dipped down to the ground. They seemed drunken. They were hobbling and making strange noises.

  The Smiths watched them stumbling about in a small circle making unusual sounds.

  "They speak German, remember," Robin said. "We won't be able to understand them."

  The stumbling Amish men seemed to be sleep walking. They held their arms straight ahead like hypnotized actors in Hollywood mummy films.

  "I think they are drunk," Bobby said.

  David picked up the camera and took a few videos of the men. The Smiths were so focused on the Amish taxi and its drunks that they never saw the ten or so crazy looking Amish biters approaching them from the woods with their arms outstretched. Nor did they have time to see a ghastly specter in their red eyes that were surrounded by golden whites...

  The strange Amish who were about to attack them were none other than Ruth Schwarz and her parents, Hannah and Jacob, who grabbed the Smiths and tore out their throats with their teeth. When their two children came to their aid, Ruth and her family did the same to them, biting open their throats. Blood exploded from them as they dropped to the ground. The Schwartz's tore open their stomachs, pulled their intestines out, and began stuffing their faces with the Smith family's innards. By the time they were finished, the Schwartz's were covered with blood from head to toe. They staggered back into the woods and disappeared. No one was the wiser.

  The people beside the Amish taxi moved incessantly back and forth as they watched the Smiths being killed. As soon as the Schwartz's left, they staggered forward and began eating from the tourists themselves picking up pieces of intestines from the grass. Reaching inside their corpses, they pulled out their livers and ate them. Soon, they were covered with blood from head to toe just like the Schwartz's. Their Amish beards glistened with red bodily fluids. They stared straight ahead, then followed the original eaters, the Schwartz's, who had disappeared into the woods. Their arms reached forward to balance their movements. Their legs moved in a slow wobble revealing how difficult it was for them to maintain their balance and to navigate their way forward and to turn to the sides or spin one hundred and eighty degrees when they wanted to turn around and go back where they had come from.

  Everywhere they went, they stumbled. Their movements were, at best, erratic. Their blood covered faces had a corpse-like appearance as though they were dead. Even so, they were still able to ambulate pretty much where they needed to be and wanted to be. It just took a little longer to get there. In addition, their vision was dimmer than it had been before they got sick, and it was almost impossible to stop their desire to eat flesh from living people. Eating human blood and flesh was their main focus and why they paced the woods. They were looking for more people, and they knew what they were going to do when they found them. Along the way, they stumbled onto a nest of baby rabbits. They grabbed the helpless bunnies and stuffed their heads into their mouths and tore them apart. Blood poured from their torn necks. They crunched down on their heads and crushed them, then swallowed it all, brains, eyes, and every other part. They sucked out the blood and gore from the bunnies' necks, then reached in with their fingers and spooned out the stomach, lungs and intestines which disappeared into their mouths along with the rest of it. When they were done only a few hind feet remained of the bunnies. They had let them fall from their fingers. The paws dropped to the forest floor when the walkers had turned to continue on their journey for more fresh victims. They preferred humans.

  #

  Sheriff Wilson was the first officer called to the scene. He grabbed his camera and began photographing everything. He had learned over the years that photography was instrumental in solving crimes. The picture never forgets, even if officers do. In the past, his early forensic pictures had often become the only real whodunit solution.

  These tourists had been torn to shreds. Wilson suspected a wolf or a large dog, maybe a pack of dogs, or a mountain lion.

  The family's mother, Robin Smith, was close to the little girl whose name was Gracie. sheriff Robert Wilson figured that the mother had tried to protect her children during the attack. She had probably covered Gracie and Bobby. Either that or she had kicked and attacked the animals that did this. Parents are known to become vicious defenders of their children and spouses when attacked. In the past, many a parent had taken a terrible knife wound for their children and continued to fight on until collapsing to the floor when they had bled out. These things happened over and over in crime investigations. Parental protection of families was a no brainer. It was what Wilson expected in such circumstances.

  Deputy Drimylos Schoenholtz made his appearance a few minutes later.

  "Hi, Drimmie," the sheriff said. Try not to walk all over the c
rime scene. I think there's shoe prints out there.

  Drimmie followed Wilson like his proverbial shadow, except for the mandatory moments when he turned away to vomit in the grass. He tried not to disturb the crime scene when he unloaded his bodily juices. Drimylos was a young man. He had been a college whiz, 23 years old, with a B.S. Criminal Justice degree which everyone in law enforcement considered to be a useless turd. Graduates like Drimmie were as useless as teats on a boar hog at a crime scene. Drimylos fit that prototype to a tee. He had proven himself in the sheriff's office to be sort of stupid, naive, and a young horn dog. Of course, the sheriff tried to be accepting of Drimmie. He pandered vociferously to the youth's needs, saying, "Don't worry about the barfing, son. We all do it." It was just another lackluster lie that he wasn't very good at. Sheriffs and Police Chiefs always tell their green horns it is okay to get sick at a horrific crime scene. It was just a convenient and politically correct cover to keep things running smoothly when the department was impaled on a treble hook.

  "What I don't understand," Robert told Deputy Drimylos, "is just why these people are so chewed up. Look at these scars. It looks like a bear or a wild cat got a hold of them, but there's nothing here to indicate anything but human involvement."

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "Because a bear or a wild cat would leave traces. There's no paw prints, no indication of an animal. But why would a human being kill people with their hands and tear out their guts and parts of their body like this?"

  The kid nodded. He didn't now what to say. He also didn't know what questions he should ask his boss. The entire scene had rattled him. The red splatter of blood, the ripped stomachs with organs hanging out as though the perps had purposely gutted them. Then, there was the problem of teeth marks, tears, and rips in their skin as though the perps tore into them with knives or with their teeth.

  "This is disgusting, sir," the kid muttered.

  "It ain't what I'd call a really nice Christmas dinner, Dimmie," the sheriff said. Dimmie was what the sheriff and everyone else called the Deputy because his real name was too fucked up for most people to remember it. So most laid back Americans in Lancaster County called him either 'Dimmie' or 'the Deputy'. Dimwit was considered but he protested.

  For the next few hours, the scene was worked by Sheriff Wilson, Deputy Schoenholtz, and the coroner, Davin Bieneck, whose breath already smelled of whiskey. That was typical of the coroner who was a well educated town alcoholic by profession. The sheriff expected nothing less from him.

  After two hours, the flies were everywhere, so the sheriff declared the crime scene off limits and said, "Let's bag up the evidence and make ourselves scarce. I'm closing the park for the next several days, and I'm going to take a look everywhere for evidence including the parking areas, the taxi, and the woods. There's got to be something here for starters. This entire scene makes zero sense to me right now."

  "I agree," the coroner said. "This entire park sucks."

  They bagged the evidence along with the Smiths' bodies, then chained off the park's entrance, placed several official warning signs, saying "Police Scene, Keep Out" and drove off.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Coroner's Office

  Coroner Davin Dieneck opened his case of scalpels and selected just the right one. "There you go, beautiful," the coroner said to his favorite scalpel. Beautiful had always been the blade he loved to use most. Beautiful was nearly always his favorite scalpel. The coroner kept Beautiful meticulously clean and sterilized to the hilt to insure that no anomalous materials would contaminate the subjects he was about to investigate during his surgeries. He cut the first subject from the breast bone down to the pelvic area. With a few incisions to the sides, he spread the skin and surveyed what little was left of a very disturbed intestinal cluster. Each victim's thorax had been ripped out. Their interiors nearly creaked when he pulled back the skin to investigate. What he saw in each case looked to him like a sociopath's toy box. The first subject was Mr. Smith. Davin knew he was the father and husband. His wallet and the Hertz rental papers in the car itself told him that the Smiths were from New York.

  The coroner noted on paper that Mr. Smith had suffered multiple tears and lacerations. "Subject seems to have lost one half of his intestines," Dr. Dieneck said to his Sony recording device. He repeated his observations and he investigated with surgical precision and noted that claw marks and chewing with teeth had occurred at the time his guts had been opened and parts of them had been eaten. "Several parts of the intestines as well as the stomach and lungs are missing as well as his other organs including the heart and portions of his liver. Since these parts were not left at the crime scene it seems prudent to speculate that they were either harvested and placed in a container or were ingested by an animal on the spot or a few moments after the original attack."

  Deep inside the man's corpse, the coroner discovered several pieces of flesh attached to someone's fingers. They were not Mr. Smith's fingers, because all of his appendages were still intact. Since Mr. Smith's family was not missing any fingers either, coroner Dieneck noted that these fingers inside the corpse were left inside the thorax and most likely came from another person outside the crime scene. Were these the fingers of an assailant or had they been planted there as a message to law enforcement? Upon closer consideration, the fingers seem to have been dead prior to the crime in question, because they exhibited necrotic sores and stains consistent with bodily decay of more than three days, possibly a longer period of time. This case was becoming more interesting the more he investigated. His notes might become quite lengthy, if these discoveries continued. "This is a multiple homicide," Dr. Dieneck said into the recorder.

  The coroner picked up the cell phone and dialed the sheriff.

  "Where are you?" Dienick asked.

  "Out on the road investigating this mess," Wilson said. "It just doesn't make sense."

  "I know."

  "What did you find?"

  The marks both inside and outside of the victims' bodies indicate an animal attack, but there's a monkey of some sort in the wood pile."

  "I appreciate your attempt at political correctness, Davin. Why don't you just say that some thing's badly fucked and stop the reckless banter. These calls are being recorded, you know, coroner, and I'd like to keep my job if you don't mind. If I'm not mistaken, you'd like to keep yours, too."

  "Now, don't get so feisty, sheriff. The thing is this. I've found someone else's dead fingers deep inside several of the bodies, fingers that have been lifeless for quite a while."

  "Fingers?"

  "That's exactly right. Fingers."

  "Whose fingers?"

  "I'd hope they are the killer's fingers, sheriff. I've sent digital pictures of them to your office. I need computer comparison ID's for matching prints if you can locate any, and you are the only man who can find them for me."

  "If the fingers were dead quite awhile, who put them inside those bodies, my friend? And why? Is the killer sending a message? What's your hunch? Do you think it is a revenge killing?"

  "I don't think anything. All I'm saying is the fingers that were previously dead were placed inside these bodies. Obviously, they cannot be the killer's fingers, or he'd have been dead a long time in which case he would not have been available to kill them. Either that or he cut off his fingers weeks ago, kept them on the dresser to suck on when he was bored, and took them to the crime scene to plant inside the bodies."

  "Everything turns to crap when there's a murder. Did you ever notice that about these cases?"

  "Murder is not delicious, sheriff. It's a nasty business, and murderers never cook up a good dinner. The recipe is always screwed up one way or the other."

  "I'll get back with you."

  "I know."

  #

  The coroner's autopsy room was quiet as death.

  The Smith's lay atop their metal tables assuming room temperature. They were being mum for now. As quiet as church mice.

  Sometime
later that evening, after the coroner had put them to sleep, Bobby Smith's little finger moved. Then, it moved again. His sister's little finger followed suit. Next the father and mother moved their little fingers. After a bit more time had elapsed, Mr. Smith sat up. His eyes were purplish in the low light of the cold autopsy room. His hands came up pointing out forward. He looked at his dead arms with an air of disbelief.

  The rest of the family somehow resurrected themselves just as he had done, lifted their arms out front like mesmerized puppets, and staggered from the room, through the door. They found benches in the next room. They sat and rested on them. Then they stood up, left the building, reached ahead with their arms, and staggered toward the town center where they slowly donned ill fitting clothes.

  Since most people were asleep, only a few saw them that night before they left town and entered the fields and woods that surrounded the village. One who saw them was a jogger whose body was found half eaten, his guts torn out across the sidewalk.

  #

  Sheriff Wilson was having breakfast the next morning. His son, Aiden, was reciting an ongoing exposition on the perfections of his girl friend, a brunette named Marlaina Kreuz, who had lived three houses down and had been Aiden's constant companion ever since they were both born. The sheriff and his wife almost considered her to be a second daughter.

  "She's a gorgeous, hot cheerleader, if that's a plus," Aiden told his mom. "Cheerleaders are prime, mom. You need to know that."

  "Not as prime as high school quarterbacks," Robert Wilson teased. "She's picking up points also in this arrangement. You are nothing to sneeze at in high school popularity contests, you know. Besides, we already approve of you seeing Marlaina. Your mother and I love her like a daughter. You know that. Besides, we've all known Marlaina for years. She lives three houses down and watches TV with us, for chrissakes."

  "Whatever. In any case, she's very hot, dad."

  Robert Wilson laughed. "Very well put, son. I'm glad you've noticed the obvious. I guess that's the end of the discussion then."