A Night of Total Terror –
A Novelization of Night of the Living Dead

Chapter One

Sunday, October 27, 1968 

	Johnny steers his Pontiac LeMans through the countryside, across narrow bridges and through empty fields where fence posts lean like weary sentinels. He turns off the main road onto a single-lane gravel drive, stones churning beneath the tires as the trees close in. The cemetery sign catches the fading light—its reflective surface pocked with bullet holes, as if generations had tried to kill the name, but failed.

	The car crunches across the well-maintained gravel, passing rows of upright tombstones and columns of neatly trimmed grave markers. He pulls the car to a stop and steps on the emergency brake to keep it from rolling. 

	“They ought to make the day the time changes the first day of summer,” Barbra says, looking at the sky. 

	Johnny butts his cigarette in the ashtray. “What?” 

	“Well, it’s eight o’clock and it’s still light,” Barbra says. She looks at him. His jaw is clenching, the tendons in his temples pulsing like a heartbeat.

	“A lot of good the extra daylight does us. Now we’ve still got a three-hour drive back. We’re not going to be home until after midnight.” 

	“Well, if it really bugged you, Johnny, you wouldn’t do it.” 

	“You think I wanna blow Sunday on a scene like this?” Johnny says, working his fingers free of his driving gloves, tugging each one as if he’s shedding responsibility. “You know, I figure we’re either gonna have to move Mother out here or move the grave into Pittsburgh.” 

	“She can’t make a trip like this,” Barbra says.

	“Oh, I know that she can’t.” His tone flattens. The drive’s worn him down, and the caffeine from breakfast has long since run its course. “Is there any of that candy left?” 

	Barbra checks the glove compartment. She doubts there’s any candy left, but if it’ll lift Johnny’s mood, it’s worth checking. She almost says that he should have done more than sip at his coffee when they’d gone to Eat’n Park with their mother for breakfast.

	“No,” Barbra says, disappointed, her stomach quietly growling.

	Johnny reaches into the back seat for the wreath their mother had picked out. He sets it in his lap and runs his fingers over the plastic roses, hesitating.

	“Look at this thing, ‘We still remember.’” He shakes his head, trying to dredge up a clear image, “I don’t. You know, I don’t even remember what the man looks like.” 

	“Johnny, it takes you five minutes.”

	“Yeah,” Johnny says, “Five minutes to put the wreath on the grave and six hours to drive back and forth. Mother wants to remember, so we trot two hundred miles into the country and she stays at home.” 

	“Well, we’re here, John, alright?” 

	Barbra rolls up her window and, not for the first time that day, wishes they’d brought someone else along. Maybe then Johnny wouldn’t be picking on her. Maybe he’d notice how uneasy this place makes her feel. The silence. The trees. The way the wind moves through the grass like something breathing. She remembers hearing a Wailers song thumping from a radio on Prospect Hill, where she was doing social work—the vocals were tinny but the words clear. She thinks: simmer down.

	Johnny scoffs and rolls up his window.

	The radio squeals to life, fourteen-hundred AM coming through the speakers. The AM bands don’t come through well until night, but the day has been calm.

	“Want to test? We're back on? Oh. Uh,” the broadcaster says on the radio. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re coming back on the air after an interruption due to technical problems.” 

	Johnny reaches for the dial, hesitates as the static clears—just long enough to wonder if he won’t be missing something important. He shuts it off mid-sentence. It’s just a wreath. It won’t take long. He slides the keys into his jacket pocket and jogs to catch up with his sister.

	“Nothing wrong with the radio. Must have been the station,” he tells her, looking across the hundreds of grave markers. 

	“Which row is it in?” she asks. 

	Barbra steps from the gravel and up onto the grass. A gust rustles the trees and bites through her coat. The air feels sharper than it should—winter testing at the outskirts of fall. She pulls the collar of her jacket closer. They crunch through the autumn leaves, looking for their father’s grave. 

	“Oh, there's no one around,” Johnny says, looking across the vacant cemetery. 

	“Well, it's late. If you’d gotten up earlier—” 

	“Oh, look, I already lost an hour's sleep in the time change,” Johnny says. 

	The bitter wind pulls Johnny’s tie from his jacket, and the skin over his solar plexus breaks out in gooseflesh.

	“I think you complain just to hear yourself talk.” 

	They have to be in the right place. The knot in her stomach and the looming familiarity of the trees confirm it. She sees the headstone, and her muscles relax with shallow relief. The thought festers—if she stays too long, something might reach up and pull her in. Her stomach flips, and she shivers—whether from cold or the thought, she doesn’t know. She tries to clear her head, but the cloying sensation clings.

	“There it is,” she says. 

	Barbra pushes a bough aside and looks at the face of her father's granite marker. The stone is unchanged, locked in time. It hasn’t aged, but she has. She recalls her father’s lifeless body, lying in the open casket at the funeral home. His face was too yellow, and below the skin, it looked like his bones had been replaced with something that didn’t quite fit. 

	She’d looked at her father's father, sitting beside her during the service, and thought that dead and old didn’t look the same. You’d think that when you were a child, because only old people died. But it wasn’t only old people. Anyone could die. She could die. That thought terrified her. It didn’t matter how much she went to church. She couldn’t pray the fear away.

	Her thoughts drift to what rests in the satin-lined box, buried in its concrete vault six feet below the yellowing grass. The last time she saw him, he just looked dead. Now, she imagines him differently—dead and old. 

	Barbra shudders. If Johnny notices it, she hopes he will attribute her quaking to the coldness of the day. She watches him lean down and stake the prongs of the wreath into the ground. 

	“I wonder what happened to the one from last year. Each year we spend good money on these things, and come out here, and the one from last year’s gone.” 

	“Well, the flowers die, and the caretaker or somebody takes them away.” 

	He presses the base of the wreath into the soil and straightens the cross with a gentle, unnecessary touch. She watches, surprised. He could complain a lot, but Johnny never failed to move in the right ways. She can’t clearly recall her father, but maybe this is what he had been like—Johnny minus the constant griping. 

	“Yeah, a little spit and polish, you can clean this up, sell it next year. Wonder how many times we bought the same one?” 

	Johnny stands and moves to the side, making room for Barbra. She kneels to pray, grounding herself as the damp grass soaks her nylons. She glances around, afraid to close her eyes in this place.

	Johnny watches and slips his gloves back on, already thinking of the long drive home, his part of the ritual complete—box checked.

	She prays silently, offering love, gratitude, and a plea for strength. 

	“Hey, come on, Barb, church was this morning, huh?” 

	Lightning flashes. Johnny flinches, blinking against the glare. A man walks the rows of gravestones—unfazed by the thunderclap that follows.

	“Hey, I mean praying's for church, huh? Come on.” He shuffles his shoes across the grass. Something about the air—sharp, expectant—makes his skin crawl. He brushes the feeling away, but the icicle of unease drips into the burbling pool of levity that he leans on when he’s stressed.

	“I haven’t seen you in church lately.” 

	Johnny snaps out a dry laugh. Easter, Christmas—she hadn’t seen him in church for at least ten years. Even today, he had waited until church service was over to see their mother. Barbra, again, had to take her by herself. 

	“Well, there's not much sense in my going to church.” 

	“Do you remember one time when we were small, we were out here? It was from right over there. I jumped out at you from behind the tree. And grandpa got all excited, and he shook his fist at me, and he said, 'Boy, you be damned to hell.'” Johnny laughs, his imitation of their grandfather falling away.

	That scare isn’t the reason she fears this place. It’s just one more thread.

	“Remember that? Right over there. Well, you used to really be scared here,” Johnny says. 

	The peace she’d hoped for doesn’t arrive, and she winds down her prayer. Prayer is supposed to be calming, but each second that passes ratchets her nerves.

	She’s done what she came to do, honoring her father’s memory as best as she can. Anything more—walking back, pretending things are fine—wasn’t part of the plan.

	“Johnny,” she says, sharpening her voice to smother the tremor threatening to escape.

	“Hey, you’re still afraid.” 

	“Stop it now. I mean it.” 

	She doesn’t want to do this. Not here. Not with that man pacing the headstones. Johnny was turning it all into theater.

	Shoving her hands in her pockets, she turns away from Johnny. She thinks of heat and warmth as Johnny wheels the Pontiac back to Pittsburgh. Maybe she’ll sleep through the ride back, and he’ll have to nudge her awake when they reach her car. If they can only get out of here, to a place where arc sodium lamps soak the streets and the city air smells of slick oil stains, everything will be better. Johnny smirks behind her, spreading into a ghoulish grin—he knows he’s going too far.

	He should stop—but her fear is blood in the water, and he circles. What’s there to be afraid of? It’s only a joke. It’s always been just a joke. Who could be frightened of a graveyard? The place is only stones and silence—oh, and bones beneath the ground, if that’s something anyone cared about. That Johnny doesn’t know the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery is beside the point. It’s so childish and weepy.

	Well, he thinks, if she can behave like a kid, so can he. After all, it's only the two of them out here, except for the man pacing the graves. And he wouldn’t care—he’s wearing a suit and minding his own business, probably out here mourning some person or other.

	“They're coming to get you, Barbra.” 

	“Stop it! You’re ignorant.” 

	“They’re coming for you, Barbra.” 

	Johnny crouches and creeps behind a headstone, slipping into his best impression of the ghastly narrators from the now-defunct EC comics. Channeling The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt, he pushes further with the charade. 

	“Stop it! You’re acting like a child.” 

	“They’re coming for you.” 

	Johnny looks to the side and sees the man in the suit walking closer. Christ, he thinks, she’ll probably even be terrified of this old guy. He’ll show her who’s acting like a child when she feels foolish. He pictures the old man’s face—bemused, aghast—when Barbra inevitably squeals like a startled cat. He could laugh about that for years.

	“Look! There comes one of them now.” 

	“He’ll hear you.” 

	Johnny hangs his mouth open in mock horror, eyes wide as he grabs Barbra's arms.

	“Here he comes now,” Johnny scans left and right, like a cornered cartoon character, “I’m getting out of here.” 

	Johnny skirts past the man, hoping he’ll bump into Barbra. The guy seems to be heading that way, maybe he’s a little lost—probably just some guy here to visit someone buried under the tree.

	“Johnny!” 

	Barbra feels the heat of embarrassment rising from beneath her collar, and drops her eyes as the man nears so she won’t meet his gaze.

	He lunges.

	His hands lash out at her neck. Time stretches. Everything sharpens. Like a television screen buzzing just before the picture wobbles into place. His skin is the color of old wax. His suit hangs from his joints, smeared with earth, blood, and something worse.

	He yanks at her, trying to pull her down, his frigid fingers digging into her collarbone. He’s strong, and she stumbles but manages to keep her feet. Johnny has to be near. He can’t let this keep happening to her. She’s sure she hears him calling, but over her hammering heart, she can’t hear any other sounds.

	This is it, she thinks, it's worse than I imagined. I must be asleep. She really does think she’s having a nightmare—it’s better than the alternative. Any time she’s died in a dream, she’s always jolted awake—frightened, yes, but safe. Her knees weaken. She wants to let go. To get it over with.

“Johnny! Help me!” 

Johnny throws himself at the man and pushes his arms away from Barbra. He’s pulled jokes before—he’d been the king of practical jokes. But this guy isn’t kidding. There’s no explanation. No words. Only violence. It’s unbelievable, and Johnny isn’t just scared, but frustrated at the senselessness of the fury that has swept down upon him.

Barbra runs away, and there’s comfort in the distance. She turns. Johnny and the man struggle. No one else is around, no one who can help. Johnny is the helper—always has been. And he needs help. But who is going to help Johnny? 

She clutches at a mausoleum and watches, helpless to do anything else, frozen to the spot, certain the man will give up soon. They’ll have a terrifying story to tell and the ride home will be blessedly quiet, but they’ll be okay. Johnny has to be okay. 

The man gnashes his teeth, biting at Johnny. He wrenches back, unable to break free from the vice-like grip of the icy hands that have caught him.

The man rakes Johnny’s pop bottle glasses from his face, fingers carving shallow grooves across his skin. The world blurs, and he stumbles, blind and off-balance. Clinging to the absurdity of the situation is the only thing keeping his fear at bay. They’re dancing like a drunken Fred Astaire bumbling through a routine with an even more inebriated partner. Johnny is no Fred Astaire. He reels. 

Johnny knocks the man down and tries to punch him, but his depth perception is off, and he misses. The man gets back up and latches on again. Single-mindedly, the man’s fingers dig into his flesh and tear at his clothes. They dance again, and Johnny’s dress shoes catch on something, he doesn’t know what, and it doesn’t matter. They fall together, and he tenses for the impact, but there’s no feeling—only a faraway sound. The world winks out for Johnny the instant his head connects with the jutting corner of a gravestone.

Johnny lies on his side, unmoving. Her Johnny isn’t moving.

	Thunder and lightning boom, and the man lifts his face, bearing his teeth at Barbra. He pushes himself upright and lurches past Johnny's limp body.

	If a mind could riot, hers would. Johnny, her brother, her helper, her hero, is hurt or dead. She has no way to know which. All she knows is the man is coming for her, and now she knows what he can do if he gets his hands on her.

	She turns and runs. 

	The dangling boughs of an evergreen don’t slow him down. He pushes through, and Barbra stumbles, her Sunday shoes catching on the uneven turf verging the cemetery. She falls, her heart bottoming out like an elevator car beneath a snapped cable. If she trips again, he’ll have her. She kicks her shoes free.

	Barbra gets up, the stockings on her feet making every running step she takes precarious. The gravel of the drive digs into the soles of her feet as she crosses to the driver’s side door. She scrambles in, slams the door, and reaches for the ignition. The keys aren't there. Johnny has the keys. Johnny—Johnny is lying back there, all alone. 

	She leans over, locks the door on the other side, and turns back to lock the driver’s side. The man slams the door, pulling on the handle and beating at the glass—the window jounces, bowing under the strikes. Barbra braces against the glass, and only a fraction of an inch is protecting her. The thought of him in here with her makes her skin crawl.

	He gives up and rushes around the Pontiac, pulling at the other door handle. She can’t see what he’s doing at first—he’s bent over, hauling a large rock from the ground. Barbra stares, dumbfounded by the enduring and escalating brutality. 

	He strikes the glass. Once. Twice. The rock leaves scars and dust on the shatter-resistant window. But it can only take so much damage. 

	On the third strike, the window crumbles and the rock flies in, striking Barbra on her thigh. She screams, pinning herself against the driver’s side door. 

	The man reaches for her, his whole body filling the car’s interior. Barbra doesn't think she's ever met anyone as big as this man. He fills the world and everything around it. His fingers snap an inch from her face. He's trying to worm further in. She can feel his impending presence, like gravity drawing them close.

	She considers bolting—abandoning the car and running again. Maybe she could reach Johnny. Maybe Johnny’s come around by now. But if she did that, she'd have nowhere to go. How far could she possibly run? 

	Barbra reaches down and pulls the release for the emergency brake, and the Pontiac begins to drift down the gravel path. The man is ripped from the window. It’s like a smothering blanket being lifted from her head, and Barbra feels she can breathe again. He latches onto the frame of the door, and the car gains speed.  

	Jagged shards of glass dig into his palms and scatter across the armrest. His grip fails, and the car coasts downhill. Barbra looks back, watching the distance grow. There’s no telling how far the car will roll before it stops. The wheel fights her as she tries to turn it—the slow roll of the car isn’t enough to compensate for the lack of power steering.

	In the rearview mirror, he’s fallen behind but hasn’t stopped pursuing the car. She feels the tires drifting onto the grass beside the road. She notices too late to correct the car's direction, and the driver’s side crumples against a tree. The car grinds to a halt. What had felt like absolution becomes a deathtrap. 

	He's getting closer, and the longer she waits, the more she can feel the wind of those flexing fingers across her face. She scrambles out of the passenger side, feeling the dig of the gravel again. She tries to walk on the sides of her feet, but the sharp pain is worse—fresh but not enough to drown out her dread.

	She runs off the road and crashes through the forest. The trees break upon a paved road, and she limps, leaving smudgy half prints behind. Terror surges again, cutting through the ache in her legs, and she picks up speed. Her limp steadies and breaks into a sprint.

	Turning again, she sees her nemesis as he emerges, shambling, from the trees. Every step she takes, he's right there, filling her cooling footprints with his own. She feels a stitch cutting into her side, blazing like white fire lancing through her muscles.

	She breaks across a field, glancing over her shoulder again and again. He's still there. She can't tell if he's fallen behind, but each time she's sure that he's gaining on her. If she doesn’t look, she’s sure those hands will find her again—but from behind this time.

	Ahead is a white farmhouse, something to hope for. A refuge. Maybe someone who can help. 

	Barbra darts past a gas pump. This is a strange place for one, she thinks. But she’s never been on an actual honest-to-goodness farm before. The sky cracks again, distant thunder trailing like giant steps pounding across the Allegheny Mountains—the relentless strides of the man behind her, her nemesis. 

	Shoving through the trees on the side of the house, she swings around to the front door. But the door on the small porch is locked. It can’t be locked. Her heart drops. She’s come all this way, and the door won’t budge. She tries again and again to turn the knob.  

	There has to be a way into the house, she’s certain of it. No one locks their doors this far out into the country. It wouldn’t make any sense. What if someone needed help? She needs help. 

	Her stockings slip on the grass, and she tumbles down the hill. She curses her Sunday dress. Is this what praying gets you? Is this what being faithful earns you? She wishes Johnny were here. Johnny would know what to do. 

	Her attacker stumbles into the yard—slack-jawed, head swinging side to side. She watches from the corner of the house, breath caught, eyes locked on the lumbering form of her pursuer.

	He hobbles, losing speed. There’s no other refuge. She runs to the back of the house. She’s done so much running—how much farther can she go? The door is wide open, and she rushes inside. A kitchen rug bunches under the door, and she struggles to push it closed. Just like her nightmares—doors that never close. They’re normal when you see them, but when you try to close the monsters out, they’re too small. She manages to get the knob to the jamb and locks it with the bolt. 

	Barbra rests against the door, catching her breath. Slowly, she turns to survey the room. The old farmhouse leans and creaks, and the wallpaper is tattered and yellowing. 

	Terrified and anxious of what may be around the corner, she steps across the creaking boards and into the dining room. 

	The thunder booms again, harsher behind the farmhouse walls. The shadowy room is tidy. Too normal, too quiet—this can’t be real after what she’s just escaped. She blinks, knowing that it’s only a nightmare if you’re asleep. She is awake, her hands are empty. She’s awake, and she doesn’t have a way to protect herself.  

	She runs back into the kitchen, watching the back door as she pulls open a drawer. And she finds it, an eight-inch chef’s knife. It's not sharp, but it’s weighty in her hand. Enough to carve out the sunken eyes of the man who had attacked her and Johnny. She clutches the knife to her chest, the cold steel a buoy in a sea of anxiety.

	She steps through the other doorway into the living room. The chaos shatters the farmhouse’s fragile normalcy. A lamp lies broken on the floor, and papers are strewn all around. She knocks a magazine off the table as she skirts the room’s wreckage, hugging the couch, checking every corner. She passes the front door, crossing the hall and reentering the dining room. It's a fight to stay centered. The house is so normal. But everything is so new, and her mind is scrambled—the inertia of terror carrying her forward.

	Stuffed boar and deer heads stare from the walls. Her heart hammers. A rollercoaster of emotion rattles down her spine, threatening to derail and shake her to pieces. She swallows, examining the room and shying away from the animal pelts—death draped on every wall. It followed her from the cemetery and into this room. Ceaseless. Relentless. It sneaks up from the bowels of time, bursting forth, a creature whose seed was planted at her father's funeral. Now it's here for her. She’ll never get away.

	She spots the man in the tattered suit outside, wrestling a low-hanging telephone line. It snaps, and she yanks the curtains shut. If that really was the phone line—

	She rushes to the phone, turning the rotary dial to zero, watching the window. The sound of breaking glass waits on the tip of her mind. He’ll break in here just like he broke into the car, she’s sure of it.

	The phone won’t connect, and she depresses the cradle repeatedly. Grimacing, she tries to dial the operator again. She’s alone. Trapped in this farmhouse with no help. With no hope. 

	She sets the receiver down with trembling fingers and cries.

	In her dash to leave the room she realizes that she's forgotten her knife—her safety—and has to return for it. She runs back to the dining room window. Night has fallen, but she can still make out the moving shapes of men shambling into the yard.

	The man lurches, directionless, staggering back and forth. Doesn’t he know that she’s inside? Why isn’t he trying to get inside? Has she wandered into the domain of some crazed cult? Are there crazies with Farmer’s Almanacs, misreading the time change, and carrying out some esoteric pagan ritual?

	The man from the cemetery, her pursuer, turns, looking at the others as they approach. Barbra is faintly hopeful that he’ll attack them, but he doesn’t, turning back toward the house. Maybe he was waiting for them so they could surround the house, cutting off any route of escape. She flees backward and starts to fall over a chair, but catches herself.  

	She rushes into the hallway and stops, gripping the banister. If she doesn’t hold on, she may fly away. She looks up the stairs. There could have been more of them outside than she was able to see. If she can find a place to hide, maybe they’ll give up and leave. She ascends the stairs, slowing with each step. There’s something on the landing.

	Grinning teeth glitter in the low light, and a lidless eye stares back at her. She can’t help herself. She screams. She wants to cover her eyes, force that image out. But instead she grips her head and flees down the stairs. The urge to throw up is overwhelming. The world spins. She clutches the banister again. They’ve been in here. She’s sure of it. Who else could have done something so horrible? She has to get out. She has to get away and find help. 

	Barbra runs back through the dining room and unlocks the front door. She bursts onto the porch and stops short. Headlights swing around and engulfed her in blinding light. She covers her face with her arms.

Chapter Two