by T. L. Bodine
You did the right thing, I tell myself, but I can’t really believe it.
***
Morning comes too quick, miserable in its silence. I lie in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house settling around me, the distant noises of cars and the rattle of a garbage truck. It’s early. I can tell because there’s nothing but silence coming from Zoe’s room, and because the light creeping in around the edges of my blackout curtains is more gray than gold.
The side of the bed that I’ve started thinking of as “Randy’s side” is empty, cold from a night of vacancy. I reach out to touch it, surprised at how smooth the blankets are, how un-rumpled the sheets.
I used to thrash around a lot in my sleep, cocooning like a burrito, blankets and sheets ending in a pile, sweat staining the edges of a mattress I couldn’t keep covered for a full night.
Now I sleep like the dead.
Sliding out of the bed, I listen to my bones creak and groan, night-stiffened tendons quivering and threatening to snap. I stretch slowly, gently, trying not to think about things pulling out of socket, of bones cracking like dry twigs.
Last night rushes back into my memory: The old lady across the street, her arm twisted impossibly, her dentures flashing in the dark.
I wish Randy had stayed the night. He’d been distracted since we talked about the Lazarus, leaving almost as soon as he came back in from smoking. Probably for the best, though; I wouldn’t have wanted him here when the Coalition showed up last night, not so he and Zoe could both turn on me for my cowardice.
Of all the good memories from yesterday — the trip up to the mesa, Zoe’s excitement about the camera — it’s that awful image of the Coalition raid that’s burned into my memory. Figures.
I try hard to shove it from my mind, forcing myself to stay here in the moment as I start to paw through the pile of clean clothes on my dresser, looking for something that looks like job interview apparel. You don’t want to over-dress for the kind of jobs I’m looking for. You show up looking for work at a tire store in a suit and tie and they’ll pretty much turn you away at the door for being a try-hard. You have to put just enough effort in that they think you’re taking it seriously, but not so much that they figure you’re making fun of them.
I try to distract myself from last night’s memories by practicing interview questions in my head.
Name a time you handled a difficult customer.
What is your biggest flaw.
What was a time you went above and beyond at your job.
It’s a little hard to concentrate when all my brain wants to do is show me pictures of awful things: that old lady; Javier digging his teeth and nails into Chuy’s guts; my dad, the way I found him when he died; the guardrail on the bridge rushing impossibly fast toward my car as I skidded off the highway.
My phone buzzes, muffled but insistent.
I frown, looking for it first on my night stand, then in the pile of clothes next to the bed until I find it.
Not a text message — a public safety warning.
ALERT!
The Undead Registration Office has issued the following warning to residents of Los Ojos, NM: An Undead has broken containment. He was last seen in the area of Alameda and South Valley. Coalition officials are coordinating with local police to contain the situation. The suspect is described as a middle-aged Hispanic male. He may be acting erratically.
If you see the suspect, do not approach or engage. He may be dangerous.
I watch as the message makes a final journey down the screen, feeling an uneasy certainty that I’m about to get a call. The description could easily fit my dad. Could he have slipped out of his room, I wonder? Attacked a guard? Hitch-hiked all the way here?
I blocked the number, I remember. If he was the escapee, would I even know?
They have Zoe’s number. They’d call her.
Wouldn’t they?
Guiltily, a wave of cold nausea lurching up from my chewed-up guts, I pull up the Lazarus House in my contacts and unblock it. A moment later, my screen populates with notifications, missed calls and voicemails previously hidden and now uncovered.
I grimace and set the phone on speaker while I finish getting dressed, letting the messages auto play.
“Shit, Davin, I need a drink. Please. Bring me something, anything, I can’t think, I can’t do anything. If I just had a little something to take the edge off, just a little bit, I could actually figure this out, please, they won’t let me have anything.”
Beep. Next message.
“I can hear them sobbing in the walls. The rats are crawling from their mouths and they’re choking on their tails and oh god oh Jesus please come get me let me out of here please I want to go home.”
Beep. Next message.
“Davin you son of a whore answer your goddamn phone I did everything for you I worked my fingers to the bone and you’re letting me sit in here and rot you worthless shit I wish you’d never been born I wish your mother had aborted you I wouldn’t be here right now if I had how could you do this to me.”
Paranoia, pleading, anger — the messages cycle a roulette wheel of emotions, and by the time they’re finished I’m feeling shaky and queasy in a way that has nothing to do with being dead. Perfect. Just what I needed before trying to put on a happy face and trying to convince Ted’s Quality Used Tires why I would be an asset to their team.
But, I remind myself, the silver lining: The most recent message is less than an hour old. No way Dad could’ve called from the Lazarus House and gotten all the way here. Whoever the escapee is, he’s not my problem.
***
Ted’s Quality Used Tires has a hand-written sign in the window, scribbled on the back of an old invoice: Now hiring friendly, dependable staff!
Trying to call on my deep reserves of friendliness and dependability, I take a steadying breath and walk inside. I look as good as I ever will. Pale, but my natural complexion helps counteract it a bit; under the right light, I just look like some young guy who’s stayed up too late playing video games and hasn’t seen the sun in a while. I’ve got my hair slicked back and I’m wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants, evergreen uniform of the underemployed. There’s a twisted, puckered scar of hastily stitched-together flesh on my cheek, but there’s nothing to do for that. The only blessing is that it mostly healed, the edges sealing like raw dough pressed together and left to rise. It doesn’t ooze or weep fluid like the scars in my gut.
Deep breath. Inhale, exhale. I should have brought some tic-tacs. I wonder if my breath smells fetid and corpselike. I don’t think it does. Randy’s doesn’t when I kiss him. Not really. He would have told me if I tasted like grave dirt. He tastes like cigarettes and cinnamon gum. But maybe it’s like house-funk; maybe you get used to it, olfactory exhaustion from smelling the same environment day after day.
I should have asked Zoe if I smelled before I left, but I hadn’t wanted to wake her, not after the whole mess that woke us up last night, not after all the arguing before that, a shitty end to what was almost a great birthday. She’d tell me, though, if I smelled. I’m sure of it.
Randy doesn’t smell. Well, he does, but it’s not an unpleasant odor. He smells like expensive cologne and that ever-present chemical tang of hair dye.
I’m stalling.
I make my way up to the counter and arrange my features in what I hope is a friendly, dependable smile.
The kid behind the counter looks young enough to make me feel ancient. Zoe’s age, maybe. The kind of guy she might have crushed on, if she were still in public school and was the type of girl to crush on guys like this.
The manager isn’t here.
There’s nothing in the schedule saying there are any interviews schedule for today, and nothing with my name on it.
He has no idea where the manager is. He doesn’t know whether they’re hiring. When I point out the sign out front, he looks thoughtful and admits it’s been there as long as he’s worked he
re — which is, he rapidly explains, three and a half weeks. He’s not sure where they keep the applications. He suggests that maybe I should come back later. No, he won’t look for my application. No, he doesn’t know when the manager might be back, or who I’m supposed to talk to.
He keeps looking at me nervously, clicking the pen he’s pulled from under the counter, forgetting to use it to write down a message. I can’t tell if he’s just oblivious, or if he’s trying to play coy with me; if he thinks I’m some kind of drunk or insane squatter, someone looking to start trouble.
And this is with me freshly showered. I wonder what he’d think of me bloody and mud-spattered, crawling up the banks of a river. I wonder what he’d think of me coughing up my insides, sweating blood from Lazarus withdrawal.
The thought brings a twisted, wry smile to my lips.
“You know what?” I say, finally, feeling like I’m getting nowhere. “Never mind. You have a great day.”
He eyes me suspiciously and I head back outside, around the corner of the building in the space between the tire store and the gas station next door, far enough from the door that he won’t see me lighting up a cigarette and decide to panic about zoning restrictions. I try to think through my options.
I can try calling the number that called to set up the interview and hope it goes to someone other than the guy currently inside. I can stand out here and wait until someone who looks authoritative goes inside. I can try canvassing the streets looking for other “help wanted” signs. I can go home and try applying online again. I can go home and admit defeat. I can call Randy and beg for a favor, tell him Zoe ate up our data limits on the internet again so we’re paying the fees.
He’ll pay it, is the worst thing.
He’ll pay it, the same as he gave me the money to buy the pickup, the same as he’s been slipping money into the cookie jar, the same as he paid for the camera. He grew up with money so it doesn’t mean anything for him to hand it out, and it all comes from his dad anyway — hush money, an allowance he gets in exchange for staying quiet and out of trouble so nobody back home finds out that he’s dead. Randy’s happy to spend his dad’s money on anything I ask, and I’m the asshole who’s too proud to accept it.
Overhead, the sky threatens rain. The sun slides behind clouds, mid-morning light growing prematurely shaded. The temperature drops, the wind changing from crisp to bone-chilling, a cutting knife-point. My skin takes on that itching, crawling feeling of anxiety, the sensation that leaves you rolling your shoulders and fidgeting in an effort to escape.
It feels like the early stages of Lazarus withdrawal, but that’s not possible. I haven’t had the drug in my system for weeks.
I don’t immediately notice the dark shape a few feet to my left – until it moves.
“Hey,” a voice that sounds like wind over dry leaves. “Sorry if I startled you.”
The speaker is huddled against the side of the building, thin knees drawn to his chest, his body mostly enfolded in layers of clothes. What I can make out beneath the bulk of the clothing looks more akin to a living skeleton than a person. It’s impossible to tell how old he is; his skin has that thin, mottled look of the elderly, but it’s also pulled tight against his skull, not wrinkled or sagging. His hair is long and limp, hanging around his collar in scraggly black strands, and his eyes seem much too large against the protuberant cheekbones of his gaunt face.
He’s missing a hand. The dirty cuff of a sleeve stops just short of his wrist; the exposed bone is yellowed with age.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say. “Out of containment.”
Is this the guy the alert was about?
Either way, he’s not one of the Underground. There’s no way this guy could pass as a Breather, and besides, Randy and I had Lazarus deals with just about every Unregistered Undead in the city. Los Ojos isn’t a big town — if this guy was one of us, I’d know him.
He inclines his head, fixing me with one over-large eye, and smiles a rictus grin. “I could say the same to you.”
My heart falters. It stutters to a stop and is still in my chest for a few seconds before lurching back to life.
“I know, son,” he rasps. “Don’t kid yourself. You think you’re the only one who can spot our kind in a crowd? You spend enough time around the dead, you start to know them by smell. You can call me Julian, by the way.”
I don’t offer him my name in reply. I stay quiet, not having much of anything to say, hoping maybe he’ll leave me alone if I seem disinterested.
“You look good, though. And fresh. Lucky. Must have died quiet.”
The scream of torn metal, the thrust of the steering column against my abdomen. Climbing on my hands and knees through the muddy arroyo, pausing to vomit chunks of flesh and red-black blood. Yeah. Quiet.
“A nice, steady supply of Lazarus, too, I expect. Light me one of those cigarettes.”
I shake one out, light it for him, not knowing anything else to do. If he decides to make a scene here, out in the open, we could both be found out. The Coalition dragging me into the back of a patrol car. Or the cops, like one of Zoe’s videos, fanning out to circle us. Imagining my blood and brains on the pavement.
“No Lazarus,” I say, because I’m worried that’s what he’s going to ask next, because I’m afraid bumming the cigarette was just the first of many favors he’s going to try to ask. “Not for a while.”
He takes the cigarette from me, holding it between two skeletal fingers of his remaining hand. The skin is scraped off in places, showing sinew and bone beneath, but the fingers still flex – more or less. He takes a long, deep drag and begins coughing, that dry rattling cough that accompanies late-stage pneumonia; the cough of someone who will never be able to dislodge the things in his chest. A moment later, he recovers, spitting a gob of something black and sticky onto the pavement.
“So if you’re off the Laz,” he says, eyeing me sidelong, “then you know how it is. You know what they say is all so much bullshit.”
“You need to leave,” I tell him. “Before anyone sees.”
Curiosity burns at me, but this isn’t a conversation I want to be having right now, and certainly not one I want to be having here. We’re out in the open, exposed, and for all I know that kid at the cash register is leaning out the door and hanging on our every word.
The guy — Julian — fixes me with a cold stare, the leathery dried skin of his face holding taut against the bone. Expressionless. Dead. Like something left in the desert to mummify. “I’ve been walking a good long while. Could be I’m done with walking. Could be I want to stay right here.”
I could go back inside, risk the ire of the kid behind the counter. But if the guy comes in after me, starts blowing both our cover, I don’t have a backup plan.
He interrupts my thoughts with sudden, rasping laughter that fades into another coughing spell. He hacks up another gob of who-knows-what from his lungs and stubs out the last of his cigarette. “I’m just fucking with you, kid. I know. I need to get on moving. Trust me, the last thing I want is to get taken back to the Lazarus House.”
“…Taken back?”
“Where’d you think I came from? Fell from the sky just to spice up your day?” His lips curve back into a humorless smile. “You didn’t think I’ve been dragging this carcass around town for years, did you?”
He has a point: Looking like he does, there’s no way he’d have lasted long on the street. It’s not always easy to tell when someone’s Undead, but when they’re pretty much a walking skeleton whose exposed bones feed into mummified flesh, that’s a good indication.
“But you can’t be from the facility,” I say, feeling my sluggish brain struggling to make sense of this information. “You look like you haven’t had a dose of Lazarus in…”
“Two months,” he volunteers. He holds up two thin, knotted fingers of his good hand. “It catches up fast, when you’ve been dead awhile. I’m one of those who can still walk.”
I stare at him, un
comprehending. There’s a terrible image flashing in my mind, my dad’s face pulled too-tight over a skull, his bones jutting out at odd angles under the surface of his skin. And then, suddenly, it’s not my dad, it’s Randy, his small frame grown frail and skeletal, pink hair sprouting from a bare skull, the dark brown pools of his eyes sunken deep in their sockets…
Julian tilts an eye in my direction, brow lifted, his tight dry skin tugging against the bones of his face with the expression. “They’re not housing folk for free in there for no reason, kid.”
Before I can say anything, someone pulls up into a nearby parking space, slamming their car door and heading inside. I cringe, shrinking against the wall, hoping to stay as hidden and innocuous as a shadow. No one pays us any mind — yet.
“You’re a jumpy one, ain’tcha,” Julian says, and lets out another wheezing laugh. “I’m not gonna bite ya, kid. Get outta here. I’ll catch a ride.”
“A ride to where?”
He shrugs. “There’s places. You wouldn’t want to know about that, though. Go on home to your nice cozy bed and whoever it is who keeps it warm and I’ll keep slumming it out here. You wouldn’t last five minutes if we swapped places. Just hand me another smoke before you go and we’ll call it even.”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I leave the rest of the pack with him and scuttle off to the truck, and when I glance back he’s faded into the shadows between the buildings, disappearing like some kind of ragged ghost.
Chapter 7
I’m sitting in the waiting room of the Lazarus House, that old converted trailer that serves as a front office. I’ve never quite figured out why they set it up this way rather than just using some of the old mission-turned-sanitarium for the same purpose. Surely there’s plenty of space in the building, with its broad wings surrounding the courtyard. Surely there are old offices and lobbies and communal spaces inside that would work just as well or better than a dumpy singlewide in the parking lot. But I guess they have their reasons. Maybe they don’t want any would-be clients seeing the Undead residents and getting cold feet about locking up their beloved relatives.
