by T. L. Bodine
Zoe giggles. For a minute, just a minute, she’s not the citizen journalist, the passionate YouTuber, the Undead advocate. She’s just a kid, a teenager with a birthday party, a cake and presents and a family. Lilith lights the candles and Ash dims the lights and we perform a self-deprecating approximation of the birthday song and Zoe’s laughing so hard at our bad singing that she can barely find the breath to blow out the candles.
I take a seat at the table and Randy’s hand finds my knee, fingertips gently tapping as he rests his palm against my thigh.
It’s a good night, a powerful one. The last we’ll have like this, as a family.
Chapter 10
The party lasts for hours.
Zoe’s gifts: A card-based party game with a political satire theme (Jo and Andrea); a shawl with a skull pattern crocheted into it (Lilith). Zoe wastes no time in sliding into the shawl, admiring it from every angle, running to the bathroom to take selfies in the mirror. It’s a nice change of pace to see her documenting something from her own life instead of current events, but of course it doesn’t last long. Within an hour of our arrival she’s busted out her video camera and is asking interview questions of everyone at the coffee shop. Ash and Lilith leave a little after nine, but the rest of us linger, chatting, playing cards.
There’s a TV bolted to the wall in the main part of the lobby, and Delilah turns it on as she starts in on the after-hours chores. I join her, grabbing the mop from the utility closet and starting in on the floor. Randy lingers in the corner, half supervising, half listening to Zoe try to coax a Lazarus withdrawal story out of Ash.
“I’m thinking of closing this place down,” Delilah tells me, conversationally, as she wipes down the glass display for muffins and pastries. “Retiring.”
“Yeah?”
“Business has slowed a lot,” she says, not looking up. “Since it’s all just coffee now.”
CJ’s had been our home base of operations for Underground meetings. It had also been an easy enough way to launder money and manage Lazarus orders among Undead throughout Los Ojos and surrounding areas. With that off the table for months — and more and more people seem to be getting rounded up by the Coalition — I can imagine she might be hurting financially.
I’m about to say something, looking for some comforting words to offer, when I catch an odd expression on Randy’s face. He’s staring over my head, gaze snapped to the television. I turn around to follow his eyes, craning my neck to see.
There’s a man on the screen, well-dressed and affably charming in the sort of effortless way that older white men can manage, that easygoing manner that can hide all manner of nastiness below. He’s waving at the camera and flashing a smile and I can’t help but think there’s something familiar about him, but I can’t quite place what.
“Ezra Lynch, the popular District Attorney-turned-governor of Georgia, announced today his formal bid for a presidential run in next year’s election,” the broadcaster is saying, and Randy makes an odd strangled noise. I throw him a sharp look, curious and immediately on edge.
The television continues: “Beloved by his Republican constituents, Lynch is best known for his tough-on-crime policies, but his recent focus has been on the public safety threat of Undead.”
The picture changes, footage of some kind of event or rally. It’s out in the open, a park maybe, filmed over the heads of a small crowd clustered at the foot of the makeshift stage. I think it must be old footage, because the trees are still green, no signs of autumn touching them anywhere. But the man at the podium is the same as the last photo: well-dressed, affably charming, vaguely familiar.
“I’m committed to the safety of every living person. And if that means being cautious about the Undead, then that’s what we have to do,” Lynch is saying in a low Southern drawl, a rumbling voice smooth as sugar. “It’s really no different than the precautions you’d take for any epidemic. It’s not a political issue. It’s an issue of humanity.”
Randy gets up abruptly, without a word, and heads to the back door. The response is so uncharacteristic that I’m momentarily baffled. I shoot Delilah a brief questioning glance, and she just shrugs, looking as confused and alarmed as I feel.
Randy is not one to walk away from the news when it upsets him. Where is the witty comeback? The off-the-cuff analysis? Frowning, I get up and follow him to the back door, leaving the half-mopped floor behind. Zoe, who’s sitting in a booth with Jo and Andrea, shoots us a questioning look as we pass, but I say nothing as I trail Randy outside.
Randy’s leaning against the wall, an unlit cigarette in his hand, staring up at the sky.
“Randy…?”
“Nice night we’re having,” he says, breezily. His hands are shaking. I watch the white tube of the unlit cigarette flutter in his grasp.
Clouds have gathered in loose gray waves over the sky, like we’re nestled down under a pile of feathers. It’s cold. Or anyway, New Mexico cold, a dry chill that would raise goose pimples on my arms if my body had the energy left for such defenses.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Just had a sudden urge to come out and admire the stars, right?”
He cranes his neck, his head lolling in a loose-jointed slow pan as his gaze sweeps the sky. There’s nothing visible up there but the clouds and, sliding between them, the blinking lights of an airplane.
“Somethin’ like that.”
“That guy on the TV,” I start, sensing that I’m wading into dangerous territory. “He, um. You know him or something?”
Randy laughs then, a cold and bitter scoff, and he crosses his arms protectively across his chest, his unlit cigarette scissored between his fingers.
Something slides into place, some lazy synapse-firing in my memory. “That’s not…that’s not your dad, is it?”
“Ding ding ding, boys, tell him what he’s won.” The bitterness in his voice cuts like a knife.
I don’t know a lot about Randy’s dad. I know he’s wealthy, and conservative, and ashamed of Randy for reasons both apparent and unknown. I knew that Randy killed himself, in part, out of spite, some misguided bid for sympathy or revenge. I know that his dad shipped him across the country to rot in New Mexico — out of sight and out of mind.
But I didn’t ever imagine his dad would be a politician, much less one running for president. I don’t know what to do with the enormity of that information. I know what it’s like to have a shit dad. But the most damage my shit dad can do now is to himself, and maybe whatever Lazarus House employees he can traumatize.
“I thought I could get away from him,” Randy says, and seems to remember there’s a cigarette in his hand. He lights it, and takes a long, bitter drag, his body doing a shudder as if of revulsion, like he’s been forced to touch something disgusting. “I really thought, if nothing else, the one bit of good in all this shit was that I could get away.”
“You did, though,” I say, because it seems like what I’m supposed to say, but it feels hollow even as I say it. I know what he means. The news, social media. It would be impossible to ignore his dad now, impossible to go through life without confronting him every day. I double down, even though I know I’m saying the wrong thing, because I don’t know what else to do. “You got out. You’ve got a home here. Family. The Underground.” Me, I want to add, but don’t.
Randy’s mouth twists into a smile. “There’s one little perk to this,” he points out. “If the media finds out about me, it will destroy him.”
A thud of discomfort in my chest, my heart sputtering. “But they’d lock you up.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he says, flapping a hand dismissively in my direction. “I won’t. The last of my self-destructive, spiteful impulses died hanging off a banister in the family foyer.”
But I know that’s not true, and a knife-twist of fear runs up through my gut and chest and throat, sharp like acid bile.
Because Randy is made of spite, and because — if this presidential bid gets serious — people will come looking for him.
And because if they find him, they’ll find me. They’ll find Zoe.
“Let’s just go back inside,” I say. My hand fidgets, fingers unfurling as if to reach out and then curling in on themselves like a wounded spider, a hesitant touch that never lands. I’m afraid to touch him, like he’ll be white-hot, radiant with his pain and anger. I’m afraid that he’ll push me away, and I’ll be too fragile to handle the rejection.
“I’ll be right there,” he says, holding up his half-finished cigarette. “I’ll just finish this.”
I hesitate.
“C’mon. Go see if Zoe’s just about ready to head home. I’ll catch up with you in a second.”
I head inside, but Randy never follows. When I go to check the parking lot ten minutes later, the Mercedes is gone.
***
Randy’s phone goes straight to voicemail when I call, and he leaves my text on “seen.”
Jo offers to give us a ride back to the house, and I gratefully accept. Her car, an older model Corolla, is downright spacious by comparison to the Mercedes, even with four of us — Andrea riding shotgun, me and Zoe in the back, her camera and card box and a take-out container full of cake piled in her lap, her new shawl tugged tight around her shoulders against the surprise chill.
“Thanks again for the ride,” I say, looking again at my phone to check if Randy’s responded.
“Of course. It’s no big. Sorry you got ditched.”
“I hope he’s okay,” Zoe says.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Andrea says. “Randy just…gets like this sometimes. Something sets him off and then he’s the only person in the world who matters. He’ll get over himself in a couple days.”
“It does suck he’s dragging you into his shit, though,” Jo says. “I know you guys have gotten close or whatever, but Randy’s a hot mess.”
She sounds protective, almost sisterly, and I appreciate the sentiment. But I can feel my nerves rising, that immediate knee-jerk desire to defend him. I quickly change the subject. I want to be pissed and hurt and worried on my own time.
Jo pulls up the curb, and I help Zoe with her armful of gifts. She’s still riding high on the good birthday mood, and she sugar-crashes almost immediately. I’m expecting her to get online like usual, but she’s in bed and snoring within half an hour. I listen to her through the walls of my bedroom as I lie awake, staring at the ceiling and the ghosts of the stick-on stars that are long-since gone, and try to make sense of what’s swirling around in my head.
***
At some point, I manage to sleep, and when I do, I sleep like the dead.
It’s past noon by the time I wake up, but it’s the weekend so I guess it doesn’t matter — even by the standards of the living and the employed, you can get by with sleeping in on a Saturday. I’m out on the porch, sitting on the picnic table and smoking a cigarette, when Zoe pops her head out.
“Davin! Davin! Come check this out!” She sounds as excited as if she’d just discovered the secret of cold fusion.
I stub out the cherry on my mostly-spent smoke. “What is it?”
“I got it! It’s not great, I mean, it kind of looks like ass, but I think it’ll totally work!” She beams.
“Am I supposed to know what the hell you’re talking about?”
“The footage?” She raises her hands in exasperation, as if I’m the biggest idiot she can imagine for not having already figured that out. “You know? You and Randy? Lazarus withdrawal? The video evidence that totally undoes literally everything the public is saying about the Undead?”
“Oh right,” I say. “That footage.”
She rolls her eyes. “Do you want to see it or not?”
I have to admit I’m curious. I know more or less what to expect, because I was there for it. But, in a real sense, I also was not there: Whole chunks of those long days are missing from my memory, like a black-out drunk who’s lost a night of embarrassment. And, like the morning-after drunk, I’m a little anxious about what I’m going to see. But I follow her down the hall all the same, peering over her shoulder as she pulls up the footage in a video editing program with a dizzying number of buttons and readouts and options. But there, in a tiny thumbnail above a bunch of illegible rows of wavy lines, I can make out a grainy desaturated image of two people in a room.
“I left this running all night to compile while we were out. I’ve been reviewing it and putting the finishing touches on it all morning. Check this out.”
Zoe clicks on the thumbnail image, expanding it to fill the screen, which doesn’t do a whole lot to improve the image quality. It looks granulated, like the footage from the world’s worst security camera. The angle is security camera-like, too, looking down on us with a fish-eye view, distorted around the edges. Between the brightness settings — which I can tell she’s jacked way up to make the dark room more visible — and the grainy desaturation, Randy and I are almost unrecognizable. That makes me feel a little better.
“This looks like one of those zoo cams,” I say. “Like we’re pandas or something.”
“Oh, hush. I didn’t exactly have a studio to work with here.”
The footage has been edited pretty extensively, fitting two days of torment into just a few minutes, speeding up and skipping long hours with dissolves and jump-cuts. But she’s done well with laying out the timeline. A text overlay keeps track of the hours as they pass, marking milestones.
One Hour: I’m sprawled on the bed, arms flung over my face as if to block out a too-bright light. I roll from one side to another in hyper-speed, thrashing around like someone trying to get comfortable in a hot room, blankets on, blankets off. Randy’s pacing the other side of the room, making small little back-and-forth trips across the floor from the master bath to the window and back again.
Six Hours: I’m at the door, barely visible in the feed. I’m pounding on it, clawing at it like a senseless animal. The whites of my eyes are visible, bright flashes in the distortion of my face. I crane my neck backward, staring up at the camera with wide unseeing eyes, mouth hanging open, swaying unsteadily on my feet. It looks like something from a horror movie, some low-budget art house zombie film, and watching it now I can feel my skin crawl.
Ten Hours: I’m sprawled on the floor, a vacant corpse. Randy is tearing at the curtains, shredding the fabric with his fingers like claws. The curtain rod falls, but he doesn’t even flinch.
Twelve Hours: We’re both dead asleep on the floor. We don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t stir. We are two corpses.
Sixteen Hours: Randy is on the bed, disemboweling a pillow. He pulls out fistfuls of stuffing, tearing and shredding, his face a mask of rage. I’m back to clawing at the door. There’s no sound, mercifully, but my mouth is wide open again, a silent primal scream.
Twenty Hours: Randy hangs over the side of the bed, vomiting something vile onto the carpet.
Twenty-Four Hours: We’re both in bed. Randy’s sitting upright, clutching the ruins of a pillow to his chest, rocking back and forth. I’m lying on my side. My hand reaches for him, and in the footage you can just barely see his lips moving.
“Did you edit out the audio?” I ask, suddenly sharply aware of what was being said in that moment, of what pain was being shared.
Zoe shakes her head. “I didn’t record audio. I didn’t think I really needed to since I was, like, on the other side of the door. And a webcam is a whole other thing than a microphone. Why?”
“Never mind.”
In the footage, I’ve pulled close to Randy, and we’ve fallen into an awkward embrace. I can hear in my mind the words that are missing: His confession of pain, the suicide that offered no relief. I wanted to see him grieve, he’d told me. I woke up alone, and I couldn’t even cut myself down. And I thought, this is Hell. This is what it means to go to Hell.
Thirty Hours: We’re dead asleep in each other’s arms, two refugees against the world, like lovers buried together to be unearthed by confused anthropologists.
Thi
rty-Six Hours: I’m stirring to life. The footage is brighter here, the daylight coming through the windows helping to make it clear. The room is a mess; I’m glad the footage is in black-and-white, because I remember waking up in that room painted in blood and bile and thinking it looked like a murder scene. It’s a little better this way, a little softer. In the footage, I sit and stare for a long time, but that vacant zombie gaze, those milk-white fish eyes, has cleared. I look human again, in a way even the camera can pick up.
Thirty-Eight Hours: Randy and I have gotten out of the bed, disappearing into the bathroom. The camera stays trained on the empty, ruined bedroom.
Forty-Hours: We emerge, damp, wearing towels. In the present moment, I cringe. I remember pretty well what happened in the shower, too, and it’s high on my list of things I will never, ever talk to my little sister about. But in the footage, at least, we look…clean. Presentable.
Zoe’s edited it so that the final image is a freeze-frame, just a stray glance where I happen to look up at the camera. Pixelated though it is, it’s a strong contrast with that feral-faced zombie who had been clawing at the door. It’s footage that tells a story, and I’m impressed. No — I’m proud as hell. I also don’t know what to do with it now that I’ve seen it.
“I’m sorry you had to see all that,” I say.
She looks at me like I’ve suddenly grown another head. “Why?”
“It’s…it’s not a pretty sight, most of it.” What if that had been the last image she’d ever seen of you, I’m thinking. What if you had never come through the other side? What if forever, you were reduced to that wide-eyed screaming monster?
“It is what it is,” Zoe says, and shrugs. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that you’re fine now. You start out normal, you go through this…I don’t know, this feral phase or whatever. And then you come out on the other side and you’re fine.”
