House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  The rain starts up as the Lazarus House drops from view in my rearview. It sluices against the windshield in a mist that’s too heavy to ignore but too light for the wipers. Every few seconds, the wipers squeal against the windshield, and I turn them off so they won’t streak and scratch the glass, only to turn them back on when the windshield gets too speckled with rain to keep going.

  It’s autumn rain, not like the violent deluge of the late summer — not like the storm that pulled the heavens down on top of me the night I died. It makes me nervous all the same. There’s something about this stretch of highway that feels cursed at this point, after everything I’ve seen and done while crossing this highway.

  When I was a kid, there were legends about this highway, too, but they were a bit more fanciful.

  There were stories about the Spanish mission, long before anyone thought to buy it and convert it into a treatment facility. Stories about the ghosts that must have inhabited its flaking adobe walls, about teens trespassing to hold seances in the abandoned grounds. But those aren’t what I’m thinking of right now. When I cross the desert alone, the thing that spooks me are the skinwalker stories I grew up with.

  In the Navajo tradition, skinwalkers are shapeshifting witches. Those stories are a cultural thing, the sort of dark legend you don’t mess with or take too lightly — and those aren’t stories to be shared outside the tribe. But that’s never stopped the idea of them from escaping out into local legend, campfire stories that twist and change with the telling, retold and adapted whether or not they’ve been understood. And those were the versions I grew up with, the bastardized urban legends told to me by my grandmother, who had her own version of every local tale. In her story, the skinwalkers were neither witch nor animal, but something in-between, something primal and inhuman. They crouched among the rocks of the mesa, naked and draped in furs. In her stories, they crawled on all fours and ate meat raw, and in the summer you could sit outside and hear their terrible howls and screams rising up into the warm night. Sometimes they would run across the road or keep pace with cars, moving inhumanly fast but with their proportions all wrong, limbs moving and bending in ways they weren’t supposed to.

  The sign off the highway lets me know the Rio de Animas is approaching. The night I died, the night my car ran off the road in the rain — I saw something on the bridge. Something inhuman, crouched over the remains of a deer. In my memory, I can see its silhouette, long tangled hair and eyes that flash in the dark.

  I had swerved to avoid that shape, swerved and lost control, hydroplaned into the guardrail and over the side, and there had been no time to understand what I had really seen or if it had even really been there at all. I figure I’d been driven off the road by some kind of optical illusion, a shadow. Probably just a trick of the light. Probably just my mind conjuring up images stitched together from campfire stories about skinwalkers and La Llorona and El Cucuy and whatever other boogeymen are rattling around up there courtesy of an overly imaginative abuela.

  But as I cross over the bridge, I catch something moving in my peripheral vision, and I slow the truck and turn to look, to reconcile what I think I just saw. I’m expecting to see a deer or a coyote, or maybe just a weird shadow against a rock or a bit of scrub. But what I see is a human shape, and it’s not in my memory this time. It’s right here in living color.

  I pull off onto the shoulder just on the other side of the highway and stare. The figure in the desert stares back at me.

  I think it’s a woman. She’s got long, wild hair and her clothes hang off her like maybe they’d been nice women’s dress clothes at one point, a dress like something a person would be buried in. She’s standing on a gravel path down off the shoulder, some kind of access road maybe thirty feet from my truck, and before I can really think clearly about what I’m doing I’m pulling back onto the road and looking for the first exit off the interstate. As my truck starts to move, the woman runs, bolting away from the highway and back into the desert, and I know I’m going to lose sight of her in a second but I think maybe I can catch up with her again. I think maybe I have an idea of where she might be going.

  I take the first right turn I can off the highway, just a little ways past the bridge. It’s not even an exit so much as a branch off onto a narrow path - an access road to one of the old natural gas wells that’s long since run dry. There was a time when natural gas was booming and Los Ojos was full of tanker trucks and oilfield workers. But that boom came and went, taking the workers with it, and now all that’s left are skeletons of old rigs: Abandoned tanks, lazy strings of barbed wire, stony access roads where the gravel has been overtaken by sand. If I were going to spend any time out in the desert, one of those old abandoned well sites is probably where I’d go.

  What was it Julian had said about hitching a ride? About there being “places” he could go?

  The path takes me away from the highway and loops backward, closing some of the distance between where the road let off and where I saw the woman — just like I’d hoped. There’s no sight of her here, and I can’t see that narrow gravel foot path, but I think I might be closing in on something. The path leads down into a little depression, a rocky hollow that’d be mostly hidden from view for the people driving past. There are no trees, but the scrub brush grows tall, and large blocks of sandstone are scattered across the landscape, worn down by wind and rain into smooth shapes.

  Up ahead is a clearing, an empty space of sandy earth; rising from the center is a large cylinder, an old storage tank from the oilfield. Beside it, rusted drilling equipment, and a number of ragged dwellings.

  Some are tents, or what could pass for a tent: tatters of fabric held up by poles. Others are small shacks built from cardboard, scrap metal, bits of particle board, things scavenged from the trash or picked up on the side of the road.

  There’s a fire burning in a metal barrel, and around it, a small group of people. Through a haze of smoke and drizzling rain, I can make out their faces. They are all clearly Undead, the kind who can’t hope to pass for Breathers.

  One is missing an arm. His raw, red stump is still oozing some foul-smelling, murky liquid. It dribbles down the side of his shirt. He’s also missing a chunk of flesh from the side of his neck and face; a silvery fragment of bone is visible at his jawline.

  Another guy seems okay except for the way his shirt clings to his torso; it hangs limp and sucked inward, way past where it should, the fabric damp and stained. I can make out the bulge of ribs under the fabric, and I’m pretty sure he’s missing a big part of his body under that shirt. I can’t begin to guess at what he’s done with the guts that have probably spilled out already.

  There’s a lady holding a toddler in the crook of one arm. There’s not a mark on the kid, so there’s no telling whether he’s Undead. Either way, he doesn’t have much to look forward to, not if this is what his life looks like - eking out a living on the fringes of town, hiding from the authorities who would round them up and send them to the Lazarus House.

  I look around for the long-haired woman, the one in the dress, and sure enough here she is — running, bent double, barely reaching this place at the same time I have. She rushes up to the side of one-arm and claws at his shirt. He wraps his remaining arm around her, and I’m not sure whether the gesture is protective of her or of me. From the way his muscles seem to strain and bulge under his skin, he’s holding her pretty tight.

  I turn off the engine, slowly open the door and slide out onto the ground.

  “I’m not here for trouble,” I say, keeping my hands up and visible.

  No-arm tightens his grip on the wild-haired woman. The other guy takes a step forward, as if to shield the mother and the kid from my view. The kid makes a quiet, wheezy noise, breath rattling out of his lungs in an unnerving way, and I think: So maybe he is dead after all. Maybe he died of whooping cough or pneumonia or something. But there’s no time to linger on that thought.

  “That’s a nice truck you’ve got,” t
he guy with one arm says.

  “You one of them? You working with them?” The guy with the sunken ribcage takes another step forward, tilting his head as he examines me like some kind of curious bird of prey.

  I keep my open truck door between us like a shield. Under normal circumstances, my heart would be hammering, my terror would be beating in my throat. But my heart stays on its usual sluggish, faltering beat. It’s just my guts that tell me this was a bad idea.

  “I’m not a snitch,” I say, which is a pretty pointless thing to tell someone, because of course a snitch would say that, but it’s the first thing that pops out of my mouth. “I just. I saw your friend.”

  I nod toward the wild-haired woman, who I notice seems to assume a sort of hunched posture, her eyes bright and her lip curled like a snarl. I try to think of the words to explain what’s brought me here, why I pulled off the highway to follow her. I followed her because I wanted to make sure she was real, sounds weird and stupid. I think that woman is the reason I died, sounds dramatic and accusatory. Neither of them really feel true, anyway. The reality is that I don’t really know why I’m here, or what I’m hoping to get out of this interaction. I followed my gut, but now my guts are screaming at me to get away.

  “Hey, look who it is,” a familiar voice rasps, coming at me from my side. I spin around to see Julian limping toward me, cradling his broken-off stump to his chest. He grins, an awful yellow-tooth smile. “If I’d known, I would’ve just asked you for a ride. Save me some time.”

  The other two guys fix him with a questioning look. I stay silent, waiting — hoping — for him to smooth this over with them.

  “He’s all right. Just a dumb kid from town.”

  “How do we know he’s not going to run and sell us out to them?”

  “He’s not. Trust me. I saw enough on the inside to know he ain’t one of them. He’ll behave.” He rolls his gaze back to me, and I think I can spot some amusement there, a little hint of a smirk in the taut, leathery skin pulled tight across his teeth. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not here for trouble,” I say. I’m still clutching at my truck door like it’s a shield. I don’t know why Julian is sticking up for me, or why he thinks he can trust me, but I’m glad he does.

  When you’re dead, you don’t heal. You don’t heal from the wounds that killed you, but you don’t heal from any other damage you sustain, either. Not really. You can stitch up a bullet hole or bandage your guts back into your body and maybe the skin will kind of seal up on itself, maybe some blood will clot and plug up a little hole. But the torn skin, the broken bones — you’re going to have those as long as your body lasts.

  If this turns into a fight, I’m going to be feeling it forever.

  Assuming they would let me leave.

  “Anyway, kid, that’s Elliot,” Julian says, pointing at the no-arm guy. “And that’s Duncan. They’re in charge here, or think they are.”

  Duncan, the dude with the sunken-in ribcage, offers a little wave, and the hint of an uncertain smile. I realize he’s younger than I first thought, maybe not all that much older than me. Maybe Olivia Nez was onto something when she said that Reanimation was hitting young people the hardest.

  “Davin,” I offer.

  The little kid starts fussing, and his mom — or whoever that lady is — shushes him and steps away, jiggling him on a hip as she moves closer to the smoky fire. The other woman, the one with the wild hair, is still watching us with suspicion. But nobody’s making a move to attack or anything, so that seems promising. I wonder if there’s even more of them out here in this little community, hidden from view. How many people can a desert sustain?

  A lot, actually, I realize. A lot of people can probably stay in these camps when nobody has to eat.

  “And who is that?” I nod to the wild-haired woman.

  “That’s Gail,” Duncan says. He seems to be the friendlier of the two, or maybe the dumber one; sometimes that’s the same thing. He twirls a finger next to his head. “Shes loco.”

  Elliot shoots him a warning look, silencing him with a glare. If Gail heard or took offense to his comment, she doesn’t seem to care; she’s still watching me warily, her hands drawn up to her chest. Elliot’s grip on her has loosened, and I see her yearning forward. Her nostrils flare, like she’s trying to smell something.

  “So, uh. You’re all out here. Off the grid,” I say, taking a stab at conversation. “Did you all escape from the Lazarus House, too?”

  Elliot, the guy with one arm, shakes his head. “Some of us did, some of us didn’t. We come from all over. Just getting by as best we can, you know.”

  I do know, or think I do.

  I have the privilege of a house and a boyfriend and a community of Undead. If I didn’t have that, where would I have ended up? If Randy hadn’t found me on the side of the road after my accident, would I have still somehow made it back home to Zoe? If things had been just slightly different, would I have ended up out here, hiding from Coalition raids and surviving out among the weeds and ruins of abandoned well sites?

  And they were already here the day I died. I’m sure of it now. That’s what I saw on the bridge.

  Were they watching me? Did anyone come to investigate? Did they think about taking me in?

  “How haven’t I heard about you before? We were up and down this highway selling Lazarus for months. I thought I knew every off-the-books Undead for a hundred miles. Unless…you’re all off Lazarus?”

  There’s a social movement, or maybe just a little club, of users on one of those deep web internet forums about the Undead. They call themselves The Dusty Bones, and they’re Undead who have chosen not to take any drugs. When I first heard about them, I figured it was some kind of fringe conspiracy stunt or something — because at the time, everybody knew that going off Lazarus was impossible. That you would come out on the other side a monster.

  My gaze shifts to Gail, and I can feel the crease in my brow, feel the worry lines deepen in a frown that I did not mean to make.

  Elliot laughs. There’s no humor in it. “We get ours direct from the source,” he says. “So we don’t need any door-to-door sales shit here. Unless you need something, I’d like you to get back in that truck and leave us alone.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not…” I frown. What does he mean, direct from the source? The Lazarus House? I have a million questions, but I can also see that they’ve got my truck surrounded, a loose semicircle of Undead slowly converging on me. “I just had no idea you were out here. I had no idea anyone was living like this.”

  “Nobody lives out here,” Duncan says.

  “And we’re not a petting zoo.” Elliot drops his hand from Gail’s side, taking a step sideways, and Duncan and the wild-haired woman advance. Julian is doubled over, hacking up thick gobs of black goo, and doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to me or the others. “So I’m going to ask you nicely one more time, get the fuck out of our home.”

  I slide back into the driver’s seat, pulling the door closed. Fumbling at the keys in the ignition.

  Just in time; Gail lunges, slamming both fists on the hood with enough strength to leave two shallow dents. She doesn’t flinch. Her eyes are locked on me, and up close I can see that there’s something weird about them; her pupils are huge, absorbing the iris, taking up the whole eye like a cat on catnip. Her lips are curled up in a snarl and I think: That’s just how Javier looked, before he tore into Chuy’s guts.

  I ease onto the gas and back away, pulling out until I find a space wide enough to turn. I glance in the rearview mirror and there she is, following after me until the truck starts picking up speed, like a guard dog chasing an intruder off the family property. Eventually I lose sight of her in the dust and the drizzling rain, but I’m certain she’s keeping pace until I get almost to the highway.

  ***

  I should have asked for more information. Now that I’m pulling away, now that the immediate threat of a fight is fading, I’m rea
lizing how stupid it was to walk away without answers. I should have forced Julian to explain what he had meant about the Lazarus House. I should have made him explain why he looks like he does, why he was so set on escaping. I should have asked Elliot what he meant about getting their Lazarus from the source.

  I glance in my rearview again, even though I’m out on the highway, even though I’ve put miles between myself and their camp now.

  There’s nobody there. Of course there isn’t. How would they have followed me?

  Home’s still a long way out, and now I’m buzzing with nerves, so I pull out my phone and tuck it into the center console, calling Randy on speed dial before putting him on speaker. He answers on the second ring, and I quickly fill him in on what’s happened: Julian the Lazarus House escapee; the Undead camp in the middle of the desert; the way they’ve slipped under even our radar by getting their Lazarus right from the source.

  I don’t tell him about my dad. I don’t tell him about his insistence about rats in the walls. I don’t tell him about Chuy being Undead, either. Those are a different kind of horror, the kind I want some time to mull over on my own. They’re different somehow than the Undead in the desert, whose existence is more of a puzzle, an enigma, than an open wound.

  Randy listens, interrupting only to get clarification here or there on small points. It feels good to unload like this, to just relay back the facts as they happened; I can feel some of the tension starting to ease out of my shoulders. But it’s short-lived.

  “So there’s a leak at the Lazarus House,” Randy says, when I’m all finished. “Somebody, somewhere, is still selling.”

  “That’s your take-away from this?” I can’t hide the incredulity in my voice. How badly did I have to explain — or how badly did he have to listen — that this would be the place his mind ended up. “You’re just going to gloss over the part where Julian said he’s escaped from the Lazarus House? Where they’re doing…whatever it is they’re doing? Where he’s obviously not getting any Lazarus?”