The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead by Stephen Knight

“Yeah, yeah, we see the guy! Get back to work!”
    The driver retreated back into the bulldozer’s cab and went back to his job. Klaff turned and looked at the man approaching them. He was about a hundred or so feet away, and looked absolutely filthy. Like he’d been in the desert a long, long time.
    “Guy looks almost dead on his feet,” he said.
    “Yeah, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. You folks from above Galveston don’t have a lot of common sense, right?”
    Klaff frowned at that comment, the way any North Texan and born son of Fort Worth would have. “What are you trying to tell me, Chester?”
    “I’m tryin’ to tell you that guy really is dead, Randy!” Chester half-shouted. “Look at him, for Christ’s sake!”
    “Chester, taking the Lord’s name in—wait a minute, now. Are you telling me that’s a zombie headed our way?” Klaff turned and looked back at the man. Sure enough, if the zombies were real, this guy certainly fit the bill.
    “You know, Randy, I have a feelin’ you’d really clean up on Family Feud,” Chester said. “You got a gun on you?”
    “Hell no, I don’t have a gun. We’re in the People’s Republic of California, not Texas!” As the figure shambled closer to the truck—and damn, it was coming right for Klaff and Chester—Klaff tried to figure what he could use as a weapon. Sure, he could hop in the truck and run the thing down, but what if it was just some lost soul? Spending time in Single Tree’s jail would probably cut into his overtime earnings. He looked in the truck’s bed. All sorts of implements lay there. He tossed the bottle of water inside and reached for a shovel.
    “Okay, I guess I can give him a line drive off the head if he’s a brain-eater,” Klaff said. He was developing a real case of the jelly-bellies right now. He had no idea what would happen if he beaned the guy on the head with a shovel in full swing, but he was certain it would involve a lot of blood.
    Chester jumped up onto the side of the truck’s bed and reached inside as well. He grabbed the handle of a pickaxe and slid back to his feet.
    “I’ll back you up,” he said.
    “Yeah, thanks a million,” Klaff said.
    By the time the figure had closed to within twenty-five yards of the truck, it was pretty clear Chester had been right. The walking corpse was dressed in the tattered remains of a business suit, and its shoes were battered and torn by the harsh desert landscape. Its eyes were covered by a film of dust, and Klaff wondered how it could even see. Was it guided by something else, like smell, or did the dead have some supernatural mechanism that led them to living prey? Given that a dead person was walking toward them, that didn’t sound so farfetched.
    The corpse stopped ten yards away and seemed to regard Klaff and Chester with its dead, dry eyes for a long moment. It stood absolutely stock-still, not moving a bit. Klaff figured that was because it wasn’t even breathing, so there was no biological processes going on that might cause movement, no motion of the diaphragm, no pulse of blood through its veins, no nothing. He heard the bulldozers grind to a halt again, and from the corner of his eye, Klaff saw Jose Ramos jump out of his backhoe. He reached under it and wrenched the rig’s tire iron out of its clip and hurried toward Klaff’s truck.
    The zombie moved then. It took in a deep, dry breath and released it in a single, monotone moan that sounded like it was being made by rocks rubbing together. It reached toward Klaff and Chester as it stiffly marched forward, its jaws spread, revealing dry, yellowed teeth inside a dusty maw.
    Klaff swung his shovel like he was Babe Ruth dinging a meatball pitch. The shovel hit the zombie square in the head, and its sharp edge ripped right through its skull, chopping off the top three inches of bone and yanking the desiccated brain right out of the pan with a dry pop. The zombie collapsed right there, as if its legs had