House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  So we locked ourselves away, just in case. Zoe had set up a webcam, snaking its cord through the door, pointing it at the room so she would have some warning if things went wrong.

  Unfortunately, Zoe’s footage turned out too dark and grainy to be of much use, and she was devastated about it. Here she was, sitting on definitive evidence that The Undead were not the monsters the media made us out to be — that we didn’t need their drugs or their treatment centers — and she couldn’t use it.

  So she’s taken to recording everything else that she can, all the brief moments of humanity and existence, just in case. Building up a case for Undead rights.

  There’s just one small flaw to her plan, something I haven’t told her about yet because I’m still trying to wrap my head around it myself: I’ve seen an Undead turn inhuman. I watched it with my own eyes.

  “Davin?”

  “Huh?”

  “You okay? You kind of…zoned out there for a second.”

  “Oh. yeah. Sorry.” I don’t know why I haven’t told her everything about what happened the night Randy and I first went off Lazarus. At the time, there had just been so much going on — Randy and I barely making it home, feverish and sweating blood and hitting that crisis stage of withdrawal, and the emergency of our uncertain futures was more important than what had happened to bring us to that point. And after, for the first couple of weeks, I hadn’t brought it up because the trauma was too fresh, the memories too upsetting. It was hard to dredge it back up.

  But how long could that excuse hold?

  Shielding Zoe from the truth is a laughable concept. Zoe lives and breathes the truth. She knows more about what’s going on in the world than probably anyone. At this point she could brief the president about the Undead crisis.

  “Just thinking about some stuff. No big.”

  “Randy?” A sly look.

  “No.”

  An exaggerated pout. “You need to be nicer to him.”

  “I am nice!”

  Eye-roll. “Whatever. I’m just saying. He’s sensitive.”

  “He’s…complicated.” And then, humiliated that I’m even thinking of beginning to have this conversation with my baby sister, I forcibly turn the subject. “Anyway. I’m going into town. I’m going to see about putting in some more job applications. You want to tag along?”

  “Nah. I’m working on some stuff.”

  “Documentary stuff?”

  She shakes her head. “College applications.”

  What little blood I have left in my veins turns icy. My voice goes high, a strangled squeak as I wrestle with my gut reaction, which sounds a lot like: No, absolutely not. “Oh yeah? Where you thinking?”

  She shrugs. “I’ve got a few. UNM and NMSU and the Colorado Art Institute…”

  “Colorado,” I echo, and feel myself forcing a smile so cheerful it hurts. “That’s, um, how far away is that?”

  “Denver.” She gives me a withering look, clearly not believing my poor attempt at cheer. “It’s like an eight hour drive, so it’s not that far. And it’s not exactly like Los Ojos has a film program. Or a college. Or literally anything to do.”

  She has a point. Los Ojos is a shithole. It’s a wide spot in the road between other small towns. Nobody chooses to live in a town like this. You just sort of end up here because it’s where you were born and you never got a chance to leave, or else something clawed at you to drag you back.

  “I’m really proud of you,” I say, but there’s been so much delay it sounds fake as hell. “I am! And you can go anywhere! I just…”

  “Don’t want me to leave,” she finishes for me.

  “I just figured you’d go to NMSU,” I say. New Mexico State University down in Las Cruces — still a drive, but not as bad as eight hours across state lines. It’s where I’d gone to school for a year before I dropped out and came home to help out when Mom died. In my head, I’d almost forgotten that there were any other schools, or that Zoe might be planning a future that would take her to the kind of place she wouldn’t want to come back from.

  I don’t want her to stay in Los Ojos, don’t get me wrong. I just, until this exact moment, haven’t thought much about what happens after she graduates. So much has happened in the last few months that thinking ahead feels completely impossible.

  But I can see from the look on her face that she’s gone on the defensive. “Dad said I should go for it.”

  Of course he did.

  Per Undead Registration Act regulations, Dad isn’t allowed within 500 yards of a minor, even his own kid. But there’s nothing stopping him from calling, and Zoe’s ear is always more sympathetic than mine.

  I’d like to say he was okay before he died, or at least before Mom died, but that would be bullshit. I mean, he was better, obviously, before he hit rock bottom and set up camp there. He held down a job, for the most part. He paid some bills and was alive, which as it turns out makes a pretty big difference. But he was still a drunk, even before Mom was in the ground, and not even his death managed to change that.

  A lot of my memories from my teens involve sitting in the car in a bar parking lot at odd hours, waiting for Dad to finish up so I could drive his stinking body back home because he couldn’t afford another DUI. I was an expert designated driver by age 15.

  His death hasn’t improved our relationship, to put it mildly.

  He doesn’t get to be a father anymore, not on my watch, not when he’s so flagrantly abandoned his post, and the idea that Zoe would talk to him about college before talking to me sends a flare of white-hot anger through my ruined body.

  But I don’t like trash-talking him to Zoe. Not when she still has good memories, somehow, not when she’s managed to hold onto something like respect or love for the guy. So I swallow down the anger as best I can, my gaze floating off to the empty space next to her head because I can’t bear to look her in the eye.

  “Well, good luck,” I say, and that fake cheerfulness is gone now, replaced with something awful and hollow. “I mean it. You’ll do great wherever you end up.”

  She shrugs, noncommittal, and moves to collect her phone and dump the rubbery failed eggs in the trash. Without another word, she pads off down the hall, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

  Chapter 2

  “Wow. You were gone for a while.” Zoe meets me at the door. I guess she heard me pulling into the drive. “You get an interview or something? You land a job?”

  I sigh, nudging past her and into the living room. Being unemployed is like its own full-time job sometimes. I don’t even know how I’ve managed to lose most of a day to driving around one tiny, dusty town looking for “Help Wanted” signs and asking for managers and filling out applications that will be immediately put in a drawer and forgotten, but I have. It’s late afternoon already, angling toward suppertime, and I’ve accomplished a lot of nothing.

  The TV is on, turned to the national news, the precursor to the local broadcast that Zoe always watches with dinner. You’d assume that a teenager with a smartphone and a bedroom full of computer equipment would get her news off social media — and she does — but watching it on television is something she does for fun. She and Dad used to watch the news all the time together when she was really little, when Mom was alive and Dad was still working for the newspaper. They used to snuggle up on the couch, her leaning against him with a stuffed animal in her arms, watching with rapt attention as broadcasters went into all the grisly details of the world’s problems, and Dad would answer her questions and point out little tidbits and trivia, especially about local stories whenever one happened to overlap with something he’d worked on. It didn’t happen all the time — the news station would broadcast from a bigger town an hour or so away, covering all the little villages and holes-in-the-highway in the surrounding area — but once in a while he could point to something on the screen and say, “Hey, I broke that story!”

  Los Ojos has always run about a decade behind the rest of the civilized world, so writing
for the town newspaper actually remained a pretty viable gig here even while people in big cities were losing journalism jobs left and right.

  I don’t know for sure if it was his paranoia about world events that lost him the job, or if losing it was the thing that made him start to snap. Either way: It had been good while it lasted, and maybe that’s a reason why Zoe clings so hard to her own journalistic ambitions, why she watches the news the way that some people watch sports.

  The TV’s on mute, so I can’t hear the audio, but the picture on the screen is a middle-aged Black woman. She’s giving what appears to be a passionate statement, with lots of looking off-camera and talking with her hands. The caption beneath her reads LOCAL WOMAN REFUSES TO BURY SON, INSISTS HE WILL COME BACK TO LIFE.

  “No, no job.” I go into the kitchen and open the fridge, not really knowing why. Habit, I guess. Reflex. I stare into the comforting glow and try to exhale my disappointment.

  Before I died, I was working at a gas station. Not exactly glamorous work, but it added up with the Social Security checks that Dad was getting, and between the two we could keep the lights on and food in the fridge. But once Dad went into the Lazarus House, his money got eaten up with treatment costs. As it turns out, those government subsidies for “free” treatment are actually mostly just reallocated SSI. I lost my job — disappearing for days when you can’t explain where you’ve been will do that — and finding a replacement has been hard. Looking for work while hiding your identity as a shambling corpse is bad enough. Doing it as a college drop-out in a small town full of other drop-outs makes it worse.

  Randy’s money has mostly been paying the bills. At first, because he was paying me for my role in our Lazarus-selling scheme. When that went to shit, he kept trying to chip in for bills or food costs, leaving money on the counter or stuck to the fridge with a magnet when I’d refuse to take it from him. I hate it, but I hate not paying the utilities even more.

  “Davin? You okay? You look…”

  I blink, realizing I’ve been standing and staring into the fridge for a long time, long enough that my skin’s picked up a chill. I close the fridge door and step away, exhausted. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s nothing.”

  “Well, cool. The facility called. Dad’s place, I mean. They wouldn’t tell me anything because I’m under age,” here she adopts a nasally falsetto, “but it sounded like maybe it was important.”

  Why didn’t they just call me? I pull my phone from my pocket and frown at the missed call. Oh. I guess I wasn’t paying attention while I was out trolling for applications.

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  “Yep. Keep me posted on what’s going on.” She tilts her head, looking up at me like she’s about to say something else, then changes her mind. “I’m going back to working on some footage. I found this new video editing software that’s supposedly really good for correcting artifacting — going to see if I can salvage any of the webcam footage from that night. Fingers crossed!”

  “Yeah,” I echo, hollow-voiced. “Fingers crossed.”

  ***

  I take the phone out back and claim my usual perch on the picnic table. The wood is gently grooved, worn smooth from sitting on it for years. I light up a cigarette and punch in the numbers for the Lazarus House.

  Before I can get them to understand that I don’t want to talk to him — that I’m just calling to see what they wanted — the front desk forwards me over to Dad. There’s a pause as they keep me on hold, explaining who I am, and the hesitant waiting noise of dead air as the phone connects. Did they put a phone in his room, I wonder? I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye, a private room that looks as much like a jail cell as anything: the metal cot and chair, bolted to the floor so he can’t throw them around anymore when he gets angry. Or is there a communal phone bank, pay phones lined up along the wall? Does Dad have to earn the privilege to use them, or can he run to them any time he feels the urge to call?

  Before I can say anything, Dad’s voice on the line:

  “Davin. Finally, you answered. You have to listen to me. You have to come, right now.”

  “Dad —”

  “You have to come. You have to get me. They’re doing terrible things to us.”

  I’ve heard this before, enough times it’s lost all its teeth.

  There’s a bunch of different kinds of drunks. There’s angry drunks, happy drunks, sad drunks — and paranoid drunks. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing: coming up with excuses for all the reasons his life has gone to shit; drinking to escape how miserable he’s made himself; falling deeper into stupid delusions from a liquor-addled brain. Lather, rinse, repeat. Dad’s been like this for years, and his death didn’t help. It’s only gotten worse the more time he has on his hands, time to sit and think and stew and worry. He can’t drink anymore, obviously, not while he’s locked up in a facility, but an Undead’s wounds never really heal, and that seems as true for drinking yourself to death as for anything else. So, as the saying goes I guess, once a drunk, always a drunk.

  So, once upon a time, Dad would nurse a beer and rant about the cell towers that were giving us cancer, about the shadow government that was surveiling us through our television, about the person who had stolen his identity and ruined his credit and his good name until no one in town wanted to hire him.

  There had not, for the record, been anyone stealing Dad’s identity. He fucked up his life all by himself.

  “Calm down, Dad. Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t,” he says. He drops his voice, conspiratorially. “Not over the phone. I have to talk to you. Face to face. Come over, please. Please come.”

  “I’ll visit you this weekend. Like always.”

  “It can’t wait. Please. Come now.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, dropping my voice although I don’t know why. “First thing in the morning, then. I’ll come tomorrow.”

  “Today,” he insists, plaintive like a little boy.

  “Dad, I can’t come right now. I’ve got — "

  “What if there’s an emergency?” he says, and I don’t like the sudden shift in his voice, a tone that suggests he’s about to make an emergency.

  “Fine.” I hear the resignation in my voice and hate myself for it. I tell him I’ll be there in an hour and not to do anything stupid in the meantime, and end the call before he can start to argue.

  Zoe is lingering in the kitchen when I come back inside. She’s heating up a tortilla over the stove burner, smoke curling up from the edges as the surface starts to bubble up and char.

  “You going somewhere?”

  “Yeah.” I hesitate. “I need to swing by Dad’s.”

  She flips her tortilla with her fingertips, then jerks her hand away quickly and shakes it. She turns off the burner. “The Hospice of the Damned?”

  “That’s the place. You need anything while I’m out?”

  “Nope.” She reaches for the tortilla again, sliding it off onto a plate, dropping it quickly and shaking her hand again. “Ow! Shit!”

  “All right, asbestos hands,” I tease, but my heart’s not in it. “It’ll be a while. You can order a pizza or something if you get hungry. Just try not to burn the house down.”

  Zoe’s buttering up the tortilla and folding it over in fourths, trying to eat it quickly before the butter melts out but mostly succeeding in just getting it all over her hands. Butter drips down her wrist. She ungracefully tries to lick it off before dropping the whole burnt-and-oily tortilla onto her plate and rubbing her hand on the dish towel hanging off the oven door.

  “What the fuck? We have pizza money? Since when?”

  “Check the cookie bear.”

  There’s a cookie jar on the kitchen counter, an old-fashioned ceramic bear with a chipped ear. I keep him because he reminds me of Mom, who couldn’t bake for shit, who would fill him up with dollar store duplex cremes instead. When I got older, it was mostly a place to hide Dad’s keys and store loose change. Randy’s been in the habit of dropping bills in t
here sometimes, hiding money like some kind of sugar daddy Easter Bunny.

  She gives me a thumbs-up, temporarily silenced by a renewed attempt to cram the rest of the dripping tortilla in her mouth.

  “Keep the door locked. I’ll probably be a while.” I leave and then linger on the doorstep, listening for the click of the deadbolt that would prove she listens. It takes a minute, but I hear it slide home and I go out to the truck, trying to summon the energy to make the drive to the Lazarus House. An hour of driving, and I know before I even pull out of the driveway that this will be a waste of gas.

  I think, briefly, of calling Randy, seeing if he could tag along for the company. But what’s the point? The Lazarus House won’t let Zoe in except for special visitation days. I can’t imagine they’d be too excited to have some stranger there. And it’s a big enough risk already having me show up, trying to pretend I’m not just as dead as the patients inside; having a pair of rogue Undead roll up is just asking for trouble.

  And despite the way things have gone since I died, trouble is usually something I try to avoid.

  ***

  The sun goes down early now, stretching out the night, and today sundown is ushered in by a thick blanket of clouds. The dying sunlight reflects off them, orange fire licking the undersides of purple clouds, and it would be beautiful if it weren’t so ominous. I’m waiting to see the lightning flicker through those heavy clouds, waiting for the sky to open up with late-monsoon rain, waiting on the highway to flood and my truck to hydroplane and send me skidding.

  Wouldn’t that be funny, I think, easing off the gas a bit as the tires touch the bridge that crosses the Rio de Animas. What are the odds that someone can die twice in two separate car accidents on the same lonely stretch of road?

  The guard rail is still busted out from when my last car went sailing through it. They’ve put up caution tape, blocking out a space around it with orange traffic barrels, but who knows when someone will bother to get it properly fixed. Somewhere down there, swept downstream, is the mangled steel corpse of my car. Somewhere down there is the place I woke up, muddy and aching, to puke up my guts and feel the death that had settled down in my heart and lungs.