by T. L. Bodine
The atmosphere in the room shifts. It seems to grow a few degrees colder, like a draft has blown through an open window somewhere. I drag a pot of beans out of the refrigerator and pull off the lid, examining them. They seem fresh enough. No mold growing on them, anyway. I take them to the stove to heat them, distract my hands, but I catch Zoe’s glance on the way. A wary look, like she’s waiting on me to take point. Like she wants me to weigh in now or forever hold my peace, and I’m real anxious about whatever she might say, so I say instead, “It seems all right. We don’t get to visit often.”
“No…I guess you wouldn’t.” That feels cryptic, but I can’t guess at what he means. He sighs, though, and there’s a weariness in it that seems genuine. Something in his voice shifts, or his bearing, like somebody’s who’s been sucking in their stomach and finally relaxes, letting out all the tension in one slumping breath. “It’s all a bit of a mess right now, isn’t it?”
That’s the first thing he’s said that doesn’t feel like a leading question, and I glance over my shoulder to exchange a look with Zoe. She meets my gaze, briefly, and gives the smallest of shrugs, nearly imperceptible. Her poker face is better than mine. There’s no question which one of us is more competent at being interrogated. Which one of us, for that matter, got less of a paddling.
“The Lazarus recall, the policy changes…it’s been hell on the child welfare system, I’ll tell you that much,” Adrian says, and drags a hand down his face, seeming to age ten years in the space of a few words. “We’ve got more kids than space already, and all the damned paperwork. There’s some light at the end of it, though, I think. It seems to be slowing down.”
Zoe perks up like a dog to a whistle. “What do you mean?”
A guilty sort of look passes over Adrian’s features, a look like he’s just realized he’s said too much, and I think it’s genuine. I notice the dark circles under his gray eyes. “The epidemic seems to be slowing down. I couldn’t tell you for certain, it’s not like I’ve got any numbers to back me up, just an impression. Folks seem to be staying dead more often now, anyway, than a couple years ago. Which makes sense I guess. Any virus is bound to run its course, one way or another.”
I think about the story on the news — Olivia Nez and her retrovirus explanation, Undeath as a type of autoimmune disease. Just as simple and mundane as celiac, death instead of gluten.
I think: It’s too good to be true. It’s too much to hope for this to be some blip on the radar of history, an inexplicable moment rather than a permanent change in the fabric of life and death.
I also think: So what does it fucking matter? If the thing’s run its course, or it hasn’t, it doesn’t make me any less dead, and it doesn’t make Dad any less gone.
Feeling suddenly gloomy, I pull the now-bubbling beans off the stove and start heating up a tortilla on the burner, the blue gas flames tickling its underside.
“Well, anyway. Zoe.” Adrian reaches for his papers, shuffling them like a nervous gesture. “You’re almost seventeen. You are still technically under my case load, and you’re certainly entitled to assistance if you want it, and I trust you’re smart enough to get that help if you need it.” From the corner of my eye I can see him looking over at me, perhaps inviting me to weigh in. “But I think we can dispense with these formal visits, if you’re okay with that?”
Zoe nods, maybe too enthusiastically, and rises up from her chair. “I think that’s a great idea,” she says, with something resembling graciousness.
“I’ll see you out,” I offer, starting away from the stove, but Adrian waves me off.
“It’s all right. I know my way from here, I promise. Take care, both of you.”
And then he’s up and out and gone, and Zoe’s sliding the bolt into the latch behind him, and I’m exhaling a long and anxious breath and feeling my not-beating heart plummet down to my toes before lurching back up to my throat.
“That was fucking weird,” Zoe comments, coming up beside me. She takes the two burritos I’ve rolled up and set on a plate and heads back to the table with them.
“I was going to eat that,” I protest.
She rolls her eyes. “Jesus Christ, Davin, you were not.”
She’s right, of course. The last time I ate a bean burrito I was puking up my internal organs for half the night, and that was with Lazarus keeping me on a mostly even keel. Still, it stings more than it should that she didn’t stop to offer me any. Just another inarguable proof of how thoroughly dead I am, how utterly irreversible this state of affairs truly is.
“So, Adrian, huh.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know what all that was about, but I don’t think I’ll like the answer when we finally figure it out.”
“You think he’s hiding something?”
“No, I think he was trying to deliver a message. But what, and why, I have no idea.” She frowns. “Maybe he knows about you.”
“I was afraid of that.” How would he know, I wonder? Some tell, some sign? Or could somebody have told him?
She shrugs again, and takes a big, un-dainty bite of her burrito, spending a long time chewing and swallowing before continuing. “If he does, he’s on our side, though. That’s the message, I think. That he’s got our back. I just can’t imagine why he’d feel like he had to tell us that.”
But my mind has wandered back to that other thing, the too-good-to-be-real thing.
Is it possible?
Are we really coming to the end of all this?
***
“All right, birthday girl. Where are we headed?”
Zoe’s cradling the new video camera in her arms like it’s a literal atomic football — like she’s afraid one wrong move and the thing will explode. That cheesy grin hasn’t come off her face since she pulled it from the wrapping. With the party still a few days away, I don’t think she was expecting any birthday treats, and it feels good to surprise her with something good for a change instead of some cataclysmic bad news.
I don’t like taking hand-outs, especially not from my let’s-not-put-a-label-on-it zombie boyfriend, but the camera was worth the money. I can’t remember the last time I saw Zoe this happy. Besides: It feels better, somehow, to get Randy’s help with paying for a gift than for paying the utilities. He’s Zoe’s friend too, sort of.
“Can we go up onto the mesa?” she asks with uncharacteristic shyness, like she’s afraid she’s already asked for too much and doesn’t want to press her luck. “I’d love to get some establishment shots of the town for the documentary. And…you know…”
I do know. When we were kids, Mom and Dad used to take us up there, picnicking in the little state park at the scenic overlook. There’s an old Indian pueblo nestled among the rocks, long empty now, the remains of a city built into the stone. Someone, nameless now and forgotten by time, painted a wordless history on those stones: people and animals and thunderbolts, glyphs of a time long past. It’s probably the coolest thing anywhere near Los Ojos, full of good memories for our family — even if memories of colonization and genocide and rewritten history cling to the place like ghosts.
The truck isn’t really made to seat three. I wasn’t thinking about that when I bought it. At the time, I couldn’t conceive of a future where there was anyone in our little family but me and Zoe. It never occurred to me we’d need seating space for more.
Randy had offered to drive, but the Mercedes is a sports car, hardly more spacious than this and certainly not well-suited to mountain roads. So instead we’re all three squeezed into the cab, a pretty ridiculous trio playing at being a family.
Zoe insists on riding shotgun so she can film out the window as we pass through the town, even though the only things to look at are laundromats and auto repair shops built in the husk of buildings that were once drive-thru liquor stores. But she’s enjoying it, and Randy’s not complaining about being squished into the middle seat, even if he won’t stop fiddling with the radio.
He rests a hand, lightly, casually, on my knee,
his fingertips tapping an idle beat. I don’t know whether he notices.
“Actually,” Zoe says, shifting and squirming in her seat to angle her head toward me. “Can we stop and get something to eat on the way?”
There’s a Blake’s near the highway exit, a semi-local burger joint known mostly for its breakfast burritos. The sign looms, the restaurant’s mascot: a figure in a top-hat and pinstripe coat, smiling broadly. His legs are two long, slender blue poles, and he rises like a giant up against the horizon, towering over the building and throwing a shadow over our car as I pull into the drive-through. There’s something vaguely sinister about him, his faded red-white-and-blue uniform, his dead white eyes. But he’s comforting, too, in a way, like a promise that there’s at least a few things in the world that will never change. Most things in my life have gone sideways since I was a kid, but the Blakes sign is as creepy as ever.
Zoe orders a green chile cheeseburger and a Pepsi. Randy, leaning over me, calls out to the window for a large strawberry milkshake before I can stop him.
“Seriously?” I hiss, more amused than agitated.
“Let a guy have his vices,” he replies, sullen.
I roll my eyes, but sigh, and there’s a brief scuffle as I try to go for my wallet and Randy grabs my hand and pins it to the seat, capturing it midway into my pocket. He’s climbing over me again, an excitable spider monkey, handing a crisp $20 to the cashier. She looks at us with an impossible to discern expression, her real brows replaced by thin, drawn-on arches that give her a perpetually bemused look.
“I could’ve paid,” I mutter.
Before Randy can offer a retort — and I can see it there, glimmering in his eyes, some bawdy commentary waiting to roll off — the food is getting shoved through the window at us, and I take it and the change and disseminate all of it, pulling away from the drive-through before I can field any more weird looks from the person at the register.
Randy happily stabs the straw into his milkshake and parks it in the corner of his mouth, slurping it in long, continuous gulps, not surfacing for air. He sucks on the straw like a calf nursing at a teat, stopping only long enough to dislodge chunks of strawberry that get wedged up inside.
About ten minutes later, on the road that winds up the side of the mesa, we pull over so he can throw up.
Ten minutes after that, we’re pulled over again, and he’s doubled over this time, coughing and hacking, his whole body spasming with the effort of expelling the offending invader. It comes up in a thick puddle, red-pink ice cream swirled through with black goo, some rancid fluid from deep down inside.
I watch, arms folded, trying not to let the sight of it send me into a retching fit of my own. Zoe, while he’s distracted, dumps the remainder of the milkshake out from the passenger side door.
“Now what have we learned?” I ask, gently chiding.
Randy flips me off, still spitting up chunks of strawberry.
When he’s finished, he stands up shakily, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He frowns. “Never used to be this bad,” he mutters. “Used to be I could eat a little, sometimes.”
“Lazarus probably helped,” I say.
He nods, stone-faced. I make him ride the rest of the way up the mesa in the bed of the truck.
Chapter 5
From the top of the mesa, you can see pretty much all of Los Ojos, a scrappy patchwork of houses and trailer parks, highways and desert. We don’t have a skyline, not really, but you can make out the crest of ambitious buildings, a bank office with pretensions of something grand.
Randy is sulking in the back of the truck, legs dangling over the edge of the open tailgate. Zoe’s in her element, though, climbing around in dirt and scraggly desert grass, pointing the camera in every direction as she messes with settings for focus, color balance, sound quality. There’s a little picnic area up here, plants growing feral up between the cracks of cement, the wood of the picnic table and benches gone driftwood gray with time and weather. I sit on one of these splintery benches and light up a cigarette.
“The quiet town of Los Ojos,” Zoe narrates, panning the camera. She’s standing near the cliff edge, peering out past the safety divider, camcorder poised to record the townscape below. “An unexpected epicenter for the Undead, home of one of the nation’s first Lazarus houses, but also home to secrets?”
She looks up, pointing the camera at me. I hold a hand up in front of my face in protest, and she pouts.
“Come on, Davin. For posterity.”
“Why do I have to be in this documentary, anyway?”
She rolls her eyes, making an impatient sound. “Because you’re what the whole subject is about?”
“Oh, you’re doing a documentary on excellent older brothers? That’s so sweet.”
She shoots me a cutting look, not even gratifying me with a comment. To think, she used to think I was funny.
“So, Davin Montoya. Twenty-four years old and recently deceased.” She keeps the camera trained on me, peering at me through the viewfinder. “You also once played a pivotal role in delivering Lazarus to the city’s most vulnerable Undead population.”
Well, that’s one way to put it. I raise a brow. What kind of documentary is she envisioning this as, anyway?
“But a Lazarus shortage forced you to change all of that and, in the process, discover the truth about this so-called miracle drug. Correct?”
She’s staring at me expectantly, all big dark puppy dog eyes behind her glasses.
“I don’t really know…”
“Come on, Davin! You never told me the whole story! So tell me now. For the camera. It’ll be great!”
I sigh. “All right, all right. Just because it’s your birthday. And if you use any of this footage before I give you permission, I will kill you.”
She finger-traces a hasty cross over her heart.
I take a long drag on my cigarette, stubbing out the cherry on the worn wood of the picnic table. “Okay. Fine. So. We’re Undead off the books. Unregistered. Nobody knows we’re dead, so we can’t get Lazarus the normal way, right? So instead what we would do is buy some from people who were registered — they’d get the drugs from their doctors, skim some doses off the top to give to us, and it all worked out okay because doctors were always prescribing them way too much.”
I glance over at Randy, who’s now perked up with interest, watching me as I describe the job that he had trained me to do.
“But then people weren’t getting treated as outpatients anymore. So it was harder to get the drugs, and we were starting to feel withdrawal.”
“And what does the withdrawal feel like?” Zoe fiddles with something on the side of the camera, I guess zooming in on my face. “According to the media, Undead who don’t take their Lazarus start to lose their minds and go violent. Is that what you were experiencing?”
I shake my head. I light another cigarette to give my hands something to do. “No. Lazarus withdrawal isn’t…it feels like dying. Although…” I frown, trying to remember through the blur. “No. There’s parts where you miss time, where things go dim and you don’t know what happens. There’s nightmares. It’s like being the sickest you’ve ever felt in your life. But, I mean, I didn’t try to eat any brains or anything, as far as I know. And neither did the other person with me at the time.”
I hedge, not sure if I should talk about Randy. If Zoe ever actually does use this footage, it’s not my choice whether or not he gets outed in it. I figure he’ll wander over here to get in front of the camera if he wants to be part of this. Honestly, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t already — I’d have assumed he was the kind of guy who can’t resist being the center of attention, no matter what.
“So the stories of Undead going vicious and turning into brainless zombies are fake,” Zoe is saying, with satisfaction.
I glance over her shoulder, beyond her, making brief eye contact with Randy, who’s leaning forward with interest from his perch on the tailgate. I take a long drag off the
cigarette and shake my head. “No, that’s not entirely true, either.”
Zoe, who’s halfway to shutting off the camera, snaps her focus back on me, rapt. “What do you mean?”
This is the part I haven’t told her, the part she doesn’t know. But it’s the part I haven’t been able to stop working over and over in my mind. “I have seen it. We have. An Undead losing his mind, going vicious like an animal.”
Zoe’s eyes go wide behind the camera, but she keeps it trained on me.
“We were arranging to buy some doses from a friend who works at the Lazarus House. These two other Undead followed us there and tried to get in on the deal. It got kind of tense. But one of the guys, he wanted to check that it was the real deal, I guess, and he tried some, and…” I feel my heart jolt, like a dead engine trying hard to turn over. I look up at Randy, seeing a look of sudden understanding on his face, a mirror image for what I feel on mine.
“Oh shit,” he says, and hops down from the truck to come close, starting to pace just behind Zoe. “It’s the Lazarus House?”
“What?” Zoe lowers the camera, looking between us without understanding.
“The Lazarus House. Fuck.” I touch my hand to my head, feeling sick and stupid but a little giddy, too, as if I were standing too close to the edge of the mesa and staring down at the jagged cliff below. “We’d been skimming from doctors and outpatients for months, years. Nobody goes nuts. But the stuff that Chuy gets us from the Lazarus house — one dose of that and Javier went crazy, remember?”
“Wait,” Zoe says, and she’s fumbling with the buttons on the side of the camera. “So you’re saying that they’re giving…that there’s something wrong with what they’re giving at the Lazarus House?”
“They could be?” I look between them, a sick sort of horror at realizing I’d never put it together until this moment. That I’d slept on this for weeks without thinking through the implications. “Look. I just know that we were all fine. And then Javier took something from Chuy, and the next thing I know he’s ripping the guy’s guts out.”
