“And then that whole mountain just up and fell,” agreed Granny softly.

  “It killed them fast. Killed them before they could get with God.”

  She nodded.

  “Like the mouth of Hell opened up and swallowed those boys,” Joshua said, his voice thick, his eyes filled with bad, bad pictures. “God.”

  “I already said it,” whispered Granny, “God didn’t have nuthin’ to do with what happened.”

  The moans were constant now. The voices clear and terrible. The metallic clinks distinct.

  Joshua laughed. Too quick and too loud. “Oh … come on! This is ridiculous. Granny, I don’t mean any disrespect, but … come on. You can’t expect me to believe any of this.”

  “I didn’t ask you to.”

  That wiped the smile off his face.

  “Granddad left because of this sound, didn’t he?”

  Granny didn’t bother to answer that.

  The moans answered it.

  The clank of metal on rock answered it.

  “No,” said Joshua. “You want me to believe that they’re still there, still down there in the dark, still … digging?”

  Granny smoked her cigarette.

  “That’s insane,” he said, anger in his voice now. “They’re dead! They’ve been dead for years. Come on, Granny, it’s insane. It’s stupid.”

  “Son,” she said, “I ain’t told you none of that. I ain’t told you nuthin’ but to listen to the wind and tell me what you think that is.”

  The voices on the wind were filled with such anger, such pain.

  Such hunger.

  The incessant clanks of pickaxes against rock were like punches, and Joshua actually yielded a step backward with each ripple of strikes. As if those pickaxes were hitting him. More wetness glistened on his face.

  “Granny,” he said in a hollow voice, “Come on …”

  Granny rocked in her rocker and smoked her cigarette.

  “All these years?” asked Joshua, and she could hear how fragile his voice was. It had taken three weeks of the sound before Hack had up and left. A lot of folks played their TV or radio loud and late to try and hide the sound.

  One by one, people left the mountain. Took some only months; took others years.

  Joshua Tharp stood in the yard and winced each time the wind blew.

  He won’t last the night, she thought. He’ll be in his car and heading back to the city before moonrise.

  “All these years … digging …”

  His eyes were suddenly wild.

  “Has … has … the sound been getting louder all these years?”

  Granny nodded. “Every night.”

  “‘Every night,’” echoed Joshua. He stood his ground, not knocked back by the ring of the pickaxes this time. Granny thought that either he had found his nerve or he had lost it entirely.

  “I ’spect one of these days they’ll dig they’s selves out of that hole.” She paused. “Out of Hell.”

  The picks rang in the night.

  Again and again.

  Then there was a cracking sound. Rock breaking off. Or breaking open.

  Joshua and Granny listened.

  There no more sounds of pickaxes.

  There were just the moans.

  Louder now. Clearer.

  So much clearer.

  “God …” whispered Joshua.

  “God had nuthin’ to do with the collapse,” said Granny. “And I expect he’s got nuthin’ to do with this.”

  The moans rode the night breeze.

  So loud and clear.

  This is another of those stories that has been brewing in my imagination for a long time. The roots of it go way back to when I was ten years old. My best friend and I snuck into the cavernous old Midway movie theater in the seedy Kensington section of our hometown of Philadelphia to see the world premiere of Night of the Living Dead. October 2, 1968. My buddy freaked midway through the flick. I stayed to see it twice. He had some real PTSD from that film—and if you’ve grown up since you can’t really appreciate the impact that film had. There had been nothing like it before, and everything that has zombies since then—The Walking Dead, iZombie, Zombieland, Game of Thrones, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Resident Evil, and all the rest—owes an unpayable debt to George R. Romero. It was the first of a new genre. And don’t even try with a counterargument that flicks like I Walked with a Zombie and others were first. They weren’t. Those films deal with a badly slanted and deeply racist interpretation of Haitian folklore. Those are technically ‘real’ zombies, whereas Romero’s monsters were flesh-eating ghouls. It was European film distributors who hung the word “zombie” on Romero’s monsters. That label stuck and will always identify this genre. As a result, when people these days mention zombies they are almost exclusively referring to the flesh-eaters. This story, then, is for that ten-year-old kid … and so many others, who discovered their favorite monsters in movie houses.

  Gavin Funke’s Monster Movie Marathon

  (Bring the Whole Family!)

  -1-

  Gavin Funke sat in the dark and watched his monster movies.

  One after the other.

  All day.

  Well into the night.

  He had the theater mostly to himself. The popcorn was fresh and the smell of it filled the entire theater with buttery goodness. The Coke was cool, not cold, but that was okay. Making ice was a luxury, and he needed as much juice as the generators would give him to run the projectors and the air conditioning.

  The theater was nearly quiet. A few people made some noise, but there was always a little of that. Over in the corner, in the darkest and most private spot in the auditorium he could hear soft moans.

  Gavin didn’t care about that. He was not that kind of voyeur.

  He sat with his feet wedged between the backs of the two seats in front of him, his sneakers parted in a V so as not to obstruct his view. On the screen a black man in a stained white shirt was hammering boards over the windows of a farmhouse. There were bangs on the doors as clumsy fists pounded on the doors and walls. Anyone with half a brain could tell those boards weren’t going to stop anyone. Even if Gavin hadn’t seen this movie a dozen times, he’d know that. They were nailed crookedly and in haste. And they were straight-nailed, not toe-nailed. Not screwed securely. Wouldn’t take much at all.

  “Dumbass,” he yelled at the screen.

  But the actor playing the guy in the movie with the monster didn’t listen. None of them ever did. They did stupid things because they were stupid characters. And they died. A lot of them died. Sometimes all of them died.

  But not Gavin Funke.

  No, sir.

  He was the star of this movie and he was not going to make any mistakes at all. Not one.

  Sure, there had been a learning curve, but the point was that he did learn.

  He dug into the tub and pulled out a fist of popcorn, not caring that some of it fell onto his shirt or lap, or onto the floor. That was what brooms were for.

  A foot kicked his chair, but he didn’t bother turning and instead said, “Mom! Shhhhh!”

  Another kick.

  “Mom, c’mon—how ’bout it?”

  Kick.

  Gavin abruptly stood up, shot his mother a lethal glare, and moved to the row in front. Not the perfect distance, but still good. And no kicking.

  He ate the popcorn more slowly, and it lasted all the way up until the hero got killed. He kept hoping the movie would—just for once—end differently. But it stubbornly refused to do so.

  -2-

  Gavin slept in because he hated mornings. That’s why he arranged the movie marathons to go well past midnight. Last night was zombie night. From one yesterday afternoon until the last credits rolled up a minute after five am.

  He was bloated with popcorn and Milk Duds and Night & Day and some shady off-brand beef jerky because, hey, he needed protein and all the good stuff was gone. Marathons were good for the soul but hard on the colon, and he spent a bad hour in the chemical toilet out by the dumpsters. Gavin was wise, though, and daubed Vicks on his upper lip to kill the smells. He read nearly three chapters of an autobiography by an actor with a huge chin. It was pretty funny, and laughing helped his colon do its business.

  Then he went inside, took a shower, dressed in new clothes that came from JC Penny. The belt was a tighter fit than it should have been, and he wondered if all that candy was nudging him up a size. That could be a problem because all he could manage was off the rack.

  “No more Milk Duds,” he promised. But that was a low bar because he didn’t have that many boxes left anyway. No way he’d cut out the Night & Day because the licorice helped him move things along.

  Gavin turned the house lights up and cleaned the theater floor. Nothing worse than walking on all that sticky mess. As he worked, he listened to Tom Waits songs on his Bluetooth earbuds. He liked Waits’s older stuff, back when it was more dramatic and melodic. Currently “Tom Traubert’s Blues” was breaking his damn heart, like it always did. Gavin had his own theories on what the lyrics meant. They were timeless. People leave, things end, hearts get broken. Hardly mattered what the singer intended. That guy was dealing with his own blues. While he knelt down to fish under a chair with a dust brush he wondered if Tom Waits was still alive. Probably. Guy like him would find some way to figure things out. He’d get his crap sorted. Gavin was sure of it.

  Maybe one of these days he’d take a drive north to find out. He thought Waits lived in Pasadena or someplace like that. Up that way. But the singer had been raised right here in San Diego, Gavin thought.

  The song ended and Gavin paused to push the buttons to play it again, but then he stopped, looking down at the debris his last brush sweep had gathered. There was some of his own popcorn, and a stray Milk Dud that still looked good.

  And a ring.

  Gold. Slender. Very pretty. With delicate old world Viking tracery that twisted all the way around the band. He picked it up and sat back on his heels. The ring was dusty, as if it had been there a long time.

  Had it? Could he have missed it the other times he cleaned the floor?

  It made his heart hurt and the tears ambushed him. He didn’t even feel them coming but suddenly they were there. Shoving their way out of him, choking him, kicking at the walls of his lungs. He caved forward so suddenly his forehead banged against the floor. It hurt but he didn’t care. Not one bit.

  He closed his fist around the ring and tried to push the fist into his chest. If he could have managed that he’d have buried the ring in the tear-moist soil of his heart.

  “Mom …”

  The single word escaped his lips. He blubbered it, and the word slipped free and fell onto the dirty floor.

  -3-

  It took a lot for Gavin to get up off the floor.

  It took so much more for him to return the ring to his mother.

  He didn’t know how he actually managed it, but he was aware of the cost. It was more than he was able to afford.

  Getting to his feet was like jacking up an unloaded truck. He was only five-nine and stocky though not yet fat, but his body felt like it weighed three or four tons. Even lifting his head away from the dirty floor was almost too much, and for a while he knelt there, stupid with pain. His nose was thick with snot and it ran, diluted by tears, over his lips and chin, hung there in pendulous strands, and fell unheeded to his chest.

  “Mom …”

  He felt something on his face and brushed at it, and watched bits of popcorn and a strand of half-chewed red licorice whip fall away. He frowned at the red candy. How long had that been there? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any, and yet it had been swept into the light by the same brush that discovered the ring. What the hell was under that chair? A black hole? The Bermuda Triangle of lost theater stuff?

  The ring was tiny but heavy in his hand.

  “Mom,” he said again. His voice sounded a little less broken to his ears, and that gave him the courage to try and stand.

  Standing. Yeah. Jesus.

  That took forever. He braced one hand on an arm rest of a seat. The wood was polished and cool and only mildly sticky. He fixed his eyes on the red fabric that covered the seat and back. Did every theater everywhere in the world use that same stuff? Was it a rule? A regulation? He didn’t know.

  He flexed the muscles in his arm and shoulder and chest and pushed.

  His body resisted, as if it and gravity were conspiring to keep him down on his knees. The traitors.

  But … no.

  This was not an act of betrayal. It was a mercy. To help him in this effort was to be complicit in more self-inflicted harm. Finding the ring was bad enough. Looking too closely at it was foolish, because seeing meant knowing. Knowing meant understanding and accepting.

  He wanted to scream. To hurl a string of the most obscene words he knew—and after all the movies he’d seen, Gavin knew them all—but that would be wrong. Mom would hear him. She never liked it when people cursed. The only time she’d ever hit him growing up was when he’d dropped an f-bomb by accident after stubbing his little toe on the edge of his bedroom door on Christmas morning when he was nine. He’d come bolting out, all happy and filled with Yuletide greed, having already peeked after his weary parents had gone to bed. There was a mountain of brightly wrapped boxes stacked like a city of goodness around the base of the glimmering tree. Gavin hadn’t been able to sleep a wink, then when he heard his parents’ door open, he’d whipped back his own and rushed into the hall. His little toe hit the corner and folded sideways with a sharp crack. Mom hadn’t heard that, though. All she heard was him howling that word over and over. And she’d given him a hearty slap.

  As he knelt there, preparing for another try to stand, he thought about that morning. Instead of opening presents, he’d fallen, clutching his foot. The toe was standing out at the wrong angle and the whole foot started to swell and darken. With a shock of horror Mom understood what had happened. She screamed. Dad came running. Then there were hugs and kisses and apologies. They bundled Gavin into the car and drove straight to the urgent care, leaving every gift unwrapped and forlorn. When they’d returned around one-thirty in the afternoon, Gavin was half dopey with painkillers and his foot was swathed in protective gauze, with the broken toe buddy-taped to the next one.

  Mom had been so contrite and embarrassed for having hit him that his own infraction for the use of that word was never spoken about. Then or ever again. She never hit him again. In retrospect, he realized that she’d simply been exhausted by sitting up until three wrapping all those presents, and then been startled by the dramatic opening of his door and him rushing out and curses filling the hall. A perfect storm that made the morning a disaster but became a much sanitized anecdote for years and years after. It was even told at the reception at Aunt Joan’s house after Dad’s funeral.

  It put a small smile on Gavin’s face. He could feel it, but the fact that it was a smile—given the circumstances—made him angry. He ground his teeth together and pushed.

  -4-

  Gavin tottered over to where Mom sat. Her eyes were alert, but they always were. They watched him approach with unfiltered anger. More like hate.

  It had become hate, born of resentment and disappointment. He knew that but tried to build layers of personal misdirection over it. She’d had a hard life. Five kids. No chance at a job until the last one, Jimmy, was in school, and by then she was in her forties. Always jostling for crappy jobs with kids not much older than her oldest. Twenty-something managers at temp jobs who really didn’t give a crap about her or anything. Dead minds overseeing numb employees in a nowhere job. The economy kept tanking, and then all that political stuff. More wars killing young men and women from town who went to serve and came home in boxes. Or, if they lived, came home damaged in body or soul. More diseases to be afraid of. Mom used to joke that her life was as frustrating and complicated as George Bailey’s in It’s a Wonderful Life, except that there were no adorable guardian angels and no heartwarming third act where everyone who was a pain in the ass came to save her.

  Gavin could see echoes of all of that in Mom’s eyes. Even now.

  He raised the ring and showed it to her, angling it to catch the glow of the house lights.

  “Look what I found under the seat,” he said.

  Mom said nothing. She glared.

  He sighed.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said.

  Nothing.

  Gavin took a half step toward her and she bared her teeth. Or, tried to. The gag didn’t really allow that. She tried to reach for him, but her thin wrists were snugged tight to the armrests by turn after turn of duct tape. Her ankles were similarly bound, and more of the tape held her torso to the chair-back and crisscrossed her body. He’d found pink duct tape. For her. For Mom.

  Her fingers were free, though, and they flexed and twitched and clawed at the armrest. It took Gavin nearly five whole minutes to capture one of those desperate fingers, clumsy the ring onto the proper finger, and snug it in place. She was not at all cooperative. She thrashed and cried out and stabbed him with those hateful stares.

  He sagged back, sweaty, gasping.

  Crying.

  He looked down the row to where Gavin’s youngest brother and sister—Jimmy and Allison—sat, with Aunt Joan next to them. Uncle Pete was next to her, and their twins—Abby and Deedee—at the far end of the row. Gavin had not yet caught up with the rest of the family. His other two sisters, Connie and Gail, and all the various and assorted cousins, nephews and nieces. There were a lot of Funkes in San Diego County. It was a Funkey place, his dad used to say. This was all he had now. Each of them tied there. Each of them his guests, however unwilling, for his nightly movie marathons. Each of them trying to break free and escape. Each of them wild with hatred.