PRAISE FOR GEORGE A. ROMERO AND DANIEL KRAUS’S THE LIVING DEAD

  “A horror landmark and a work of gory genius marked by all of Romero’s trademark wit, humanity, and merciless social observations. How lucky are we to have this final act of grand guignol from the man who made the dead walk?”

  —Joe Hill

  “Will play out on the inside of your skull long after you’ve finished it.”

  —Clive Barker

  “Panoramic and sweeping, a smorgasbord of the undead, a book that will give even the most ardent zombie lovers their fix.”

  —New York Times

  “The definitive account of the zombie apocalypse. It expands, clarifies, and concludes a tale more than fifty years in the telling, and does so with wit, style, and a deep sense of commitment.”

  —Washington Post

  “A zombie tale for the ages. This is a rare gem of a story, one that pays homage to its varied source material, while also standing on its own merits. A true gift to horror fans.”

  —Library Journal (Starred review, a Top 10 Horror Novel of 2020)

  “The last testament of the legendary filmmaker is a sprawling novel about the zombie apocalypse that dwarfs even his classic movie cycle.… A spectacular horror epic laden with Romero’s signature shocks and censures of societal ills.”

  —Kirkus

  “Every zombie movie lives in the shadow of Romero, but he never got the budget to work at the scale he deserved. Fortunately, Daniel Kraus delivers the epic book of the dead that Romero began. That shadow just got a whole lot bigger.”

  —Grady Hendrix, bestselling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

  “If Night of the Living Dead was the first word in the dead rising field, The Living Dead is the last word. A monumental achievement.”

  —Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

  “A posthumous zombie novel as urgent as Romero’s ’60s classics.… There are so many sympathetic protagonists that it’s impossible to predict who will survive and who will be eaten.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  ALSO BY DANIEL KRAUS

  NOVELS

  Whalefall

  The Ghost That Ate Us

  Bent Heavens

  Blood Sugar

  The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch: Volume Two: Empire Decayed

  The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch: Volume One: At the Edge of Empire

  Scowler

  Rotters

  The Monster Variations

  The Teddies Saga

  They Threw Us Away

  They Stole Our Hearts

  They Set the Fire

  WITH GEORGE A. ROMERO

  The Living Dead

  WITH SHÄRON MOALEM

  Wrath

  WITH GUILLERMO DEL TORO

  Trollhunters

  The Shape of Water

  WITH LISI HARRISON

  Graveyard Girls

  1-2-3-4, I Declare a Thumb War

  Scream for the Camera

  Season’s Eatings

  GRAPHIC NOVELS

  The Cemeterians

  Trojan

  Year Zero: Volume 0

  The Autumnal

  ALSO BY GEORGE A. ROMERO

  WITH DANIEL KRAUS

  The Living Dead

  EDITED BY JONATHAN

  MAYBERRY AND ROMERO

  Nights of the Living Dead: An Anthology

  WITH SUSANNA SPARROW

  Dawn of the Dead

  Martin

  FOR CHILDREN:

  The Little World of Humongo Bongo

  UNION SQUARE & CO. and the distinctive Union Square & Co. logo are trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  Union Square & Co., LLC, is a subsidiary of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  Text © 2024 New Romero Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  All trademarks are the property of their respective owners, are used for editorial purposes only, and the publisher makes no claim of ownership and shall acquire no right, title, or interest in such trademarks by virtue of this publication.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-4549-5089-9

  ISBN 978-1-4549-5090-5 (e-book)

  For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium purchases, please contact specialsales@unionsquareandco.com.

  unionsquareandco.com

  Cover design by Patrick Sullivan and Igor Satanovsky

  Cover art: illustration by Evangeline Gallagher © 2024 Union Square & Co., LLC; MaxyM/Sutterstock.com (paper)

  Interior design by Rich Hazelton

  Interior illustration (eye): bogadeva1983/Shutterstock.com: 1, 169

  For Suzanne Descrocher-Romero

  COAUTHOR NOTE

  For this novel’s portrayal of Cajun speech, I have taken my cue from Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast, in which he writes:

  Clearly, to write all of the Cajun dialogue in this book … would exhaust the reader and prove, in the end, disrespectful to Cajuns. The true color and dignity of their speech would inevitably be lost in translation. Therefore I’ve chosen a more limited portrayal, faithfully omitting the th sound and including some of the altered grammar without laying things on too thick. This approach serves to consistently remind the reader that Cajuns do, in fact, sound different from most Americans without loading the pages down with an impenetrable soup of dialogue.

  —Daniel Kraus

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Coauthor Note

  Hog Guzzle ~ or ~ Keeping Track of Nasty-Sugar

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Queen Cottonmouth ~ or ~ Red Witch Triumphant

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  ~ 1 ~

  BOB FIREMAN’S WAGON WHEEL CARNIVAL had rolled its calliope pennants to the outskirts of Alligator Point’s green inferno every January 8 since—well, no still-living Pointer could recall it not coming. The carny’s clockwork arrival honored an event even kids as small as Pontiac knew. Each year since starting school, she’d heard the same tale from her teacher, Miss Ward.

  Under the cold, slithering daybreak fog of January 8, 1815—Miss Ward favored a flowery windup—fifteen thousand musket-wielding British soldiers stormed the only defense shielding New Orleans: an eight-hundred-yard mud barricade. We Yanks had one-third the manpower, a hastily sewn blanket of army regulars, free Blacks, frontier riflemen, Choctaw Indians, and swashbucklers under the Jolly Roger of the Pirates Lafitte. Yet the ragtag throng fell into mystical lockstep under Major General Andrew Jackson, who, in these parts, ran second in celebrity only to Jesus. Two hours later, the Brits paddled home, tails twixt legs. Their dead got pitched down a hole in the Chalmette Plantation battlefield, the only gaffe Jackson made. This was bayou country. The steamy soil said hell no to John Bulls, even dead ones, and pushed those rotting redcoats back into the sweltering sun.

  According to Miss Ward, the Battle of New Orleans had been a national holiday, called simply “the Eighth,” for fifty fuck-damn years! (Miss Ward didn’t say fuck-damn, but Pontiac did, quiet, so only Billy May heard.) Somewhere, somehow, January 8 lost its prestige, but that didn’t surprise Pontiac. Things had a way of getting lost down here in the swamp. Louisianans, though, kept the date; folk down here loved their celebrations. Every backwater holler Pontiac tread, she heard the spongy land breathe life back into the vaunted dead.

  Jackson: the susurration of sugarcane.

  Lafitte: the algae hiss as gators skimmed.

  No one held faster to January 8 than Bob Fireman, a fellow who didn’t exist but whose name gamboled across every food stand, sandwich board, and you-must-be-this-tall placard in the carnival. Bob Fireman’s Wagon Whee l Carnival wouldn’t arrive in Alligator Point proper until June 23—a different Louisiana holiday called St. John’s Day. The January 8 carny was a forty-minute walk north in the dry-land town of Dawes, which had itself a Piggly Wiggly, a Greyhound station, and lots of other modern conveniences.

  That’s where Pontiac was headed, her nine-year-old, four-foot, fifty-five-pound body as agitated as a shaken soda can.

  Daddy wouldn’t approve of her speed. “Run too fast at night, cher, and you be sayin bonsoir to the bottom of de quick,” he often warned in his baritone Cajun. That was the sober version. Half a bottle of Everclear into a blitz, his advice got less folksy: “Quicksand, fool!”

  Tonight she had no intention of slowing. Besides, quicksand couldn’t snag her so long as she kept to the road. More likely she’d fall into one of the holes Daddy dug himself: Barataria Bay was pitted with his telltale pits, those fruitless attempts at finding the pirate booty Jean Lafitte supposedly hid almost two hundred years ago.

  That’s why she’d swung by Doc’s Mercantile beforehand. She’d been saving for the Whiz-Bang fishing rod in the window but had no choice but to blow all she had on a $4.99 flashlight. How else to avoid all ten million of Daddy’s embarrassing holes? Up ahead she could see plenty of other Pointers on their way to Dawes. Like will-o’-the-wisps, their flashlights bobbed.

  The fingers of Pontiac’s opposite hand sunk into the humid cover of a book Mr. Peff the librarian joshed was more’n half her size: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales by H. P. Lovecraft.

  Like most of the older books in the one-room library, somebody a long while back had carved an octopus symbol into it, this time inside the back cover. Old octopus symbols were all over Alligator Point. On mossed swamp rocks, old tree trunks, the sides of ancient shanties. Pontiac didn’t know why. When she asked Daddy, she didn’t get but an irritated shrug.

  Daddy didn’t like not knowing stuff.

  Pontiac didn’t either. That’s why she read all the fuck-damn time, to the exasperation of Billy May and the sullenness of Daddy, who glared at her books like they were better men, none of whom needed hooch before facing the day. Mr. Lovecraft, her current choice, designed sentences as serpentine as anything in the swamp. They had rippling scales, dripping fangs.

  It lumbered slobberingly into sight, he wrote.

  Armed with a book like this, nothing at Bob Fireman’s could spook Pontiac.

  This 618-page tome was the only protection she had since her best friend, Billy May, had claimed he was too tired to come to the carny, when the truth was he was too chicken. Pontiac was rip-snorting mad. She and Billy May always went to Bob Fireman’s, on January 8 and June 23 both. Billy always said he could hear the carny’s trucks rumbling all the way from New Orleans.

  A fib, naturally. But fibs aren’t quite lies. Fibs are truths stretched taffy-thin to make life more interesting. Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival was a cathedral built to the glory of fibbing. You couldn’t turn your head without bonking into the best fibs you ever saw.

  THE WORLD’S SCARIEST RIDE—she doubted that!

  $5 TO SEE INDIA’S BIGGEST RAT—try again, suckers!

  YOU CAN’T ESCAPE THE MUTANT MAZE—you wanna bet?

  That was the trickiest, stickiest part of fibs. Spit them often enough and they piled thick and crusted hard like wasp nests. Daddy said New Orleans was built on “fibs, lies, and fabrications,” the three pillars keeping the city from going glug-glug-glug into the quag. Down here your lungs breathed fibs right along with Bradford pear, Confederate jasmine, Creole mirepoix, and fresh beignets—and the bad stuff too, the flood mold, hot-trash crawfish shells, tourist-buggy horse shit, and Bourbon Street’s hobo funk of liquor, piss, and puke. What didn’t end up in a New Orleanian’s blood ended up filling every pothole in the Quarter—a bubbly black tarn of viscid vice.

  Some Pointers called it “nasty-sugar.” It’d get you flying high, yes’m, but it’d gobble your insides too, sure as four dogs have four assholes.

  Pontiac splashed through a moat of water spangles and ducked under a spruce-pine bend, and suddenly there was Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel. Carousel lights flashed like wet teeth and greasy treats exhaled like hot breath.

  Right inside, waiting for her—and her alone—was the Chamber of Dragons. Pontiac’s pores oozed cane sugar. It hurt. She ran her fingertips over the octopus carving in her book and thought about turning tail like Billy May, heading back home.

  If things did lumber at Bob Fireman’s, if things did slobber, it was inside the Chamber.

  ~ 2 ~

  A SLIVER TILL MIDNIGHT, Billy heard his name.

  “Billy May? Billy May, you in dere?”

  He’d been waiting for this call since school let out. On vine-swallowed Alligator Point, where it was hard to tell if your feet were planted in the dry or the damp, where air was water and the skeeters had learned to swim, it was dark enough while the sun was up. When the sun set, round four-thirty this time of year, all things under the Point’s green umbrellas went black.

  It had gotten dark during Billy and Pontiac’s walk home. Two-and-a-quarter miles, a narrow dirt track forged by folk who walked, every day, in and out of the Point. There wasn’t no roads. The track dodged opaque pools of stinking sulfur that rose and fell with the Gulf of Mexico tides. There was no telling what was inside—what he and Pontiac had dubbed “hog guzzle,” after the dark slime of mud, grass, chicken shit, and dead vermin in Seth Durber’s hog sty.

  Billy had wanted to confess to Pontiac what was spooking him. It was the thing kids whispered about, the thing that drank laughter like Kool-Aid, that chewed good feelings like bubblegum. He’d had a hunch, sure as hunger, or sickness, or needing to pee, that it was coming for him.

  The Piper, some folk called it.

  But the whole walk home, the Piper didn’t grab Billy’s ankle from inside the coco-yam or drop down from the Spanish moss. Maybe Pontiac’s loud, foul mouth kept it at bay. Getting home safe made Billy feel squat-percent better. That was another thing every kid knew: the Piper made you come to it.

  “Billy May,” the voice called. “Don’t you hear me?”

  The window sash was up. The skeeter screen was down. The voice needled through it at a child’s pitch. Billy couldn’t tell if he was awake or bad-dreaming. Also, there was the smell of lilacs. Mama didn’t plant no lilacs.

  “I ain’t here!” Billy shouted.

  Well, shit-balls, that was dumb. Billy cursed himself while the kid-voice chuckled.

  Billy backpedaled. “I mean … I’m not allowed to come out. Not allowed to do nothin. It’s bedtime. Mama and Daddy’s right in here with me.”

  “Dat so?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ask one of dem to come to de window, so dey can tell you I ain’t nuddin to be afraid of.”

  “Who says I’m afraid?”

  “Now, Billy May. Anybody wit’ half an ear can tell you afraid. Your little girlfriend could tell. Dat’s why she up and ditched you.”

  The thing outside his window knew Pontiac? That scared Billy deep. Unpacking that fear from his chest was like pulling wet leaves from a rubbish bag.

  “You go on talking,” Billy said. “I’m not waking up my folks.”

  The voice sounded pained. “I’d hate if it got around dat Billy May sleeps in de same room as his folks.”

  Lord, there were so many different kinds of fear.

  “I don’t,” Billy insisted.

  “So your ma and pa, dey not really right dere, are dey?”

  The voice’s Cajun was peculiar. Most kids Billy’s age didn’t carry the accent thanks to TV, which flickered to life in these far-flung parts twenty years back.

  The skeeter screen shivered. Maybe a breeze. Or maybe the voice was that close.

  “Sound to me like you t’ink I’m somet’in bad. Let me ask you dis. How do I know who you are? I can’t see who I’m talkin to eidder!”

  Billy lay silent. It was a good point.

  “Well, come over here, then,” Billy said. “Look in the window.”

  “Ah, my eyesight’s for shit. Can’t see one foot in front of my face.”

  “Then how come you’re out at night?” Billy challenged. “Even harder to see in the dark.”

  “My old man. Whupped me again. Booted me out. Now, look, I got me a pack of Pall Malls. Stole it out my old man’s Levi’s on de way out. Figured to offer you some.”

  “Chuck?” Billy brightened. “Chucky Steve Beatty? That you?”

  Now this was different! Billy had smoked Pall Malls three times with Chucky Steve Beatty. It was a good feeling. It was a tough feeling. He wouldn’t mind feeling tough again. Folk might call cigarettes and Big Gulps nasty-sugar, but they sure tasted fine.

 

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