by T. L. Bodine
“Something like that,” he echoes, bitterly. “And now? Now if I try to go back on it, if I try to take the drugs, they don’t even work. It’s been too long. All the Lazarus in the world isn’t gonna save me now. Now how’s that for an experiment?”
Is there some kind of Lazarus formula that causes the rage to set in? Some experimental blend? Did Chuy know when he brought it to the park that night? Or did he just bring it by accident, not realizing what his employers were actually doing?
Did they leak it out into the public on purpose? Or was it an accident?
Randy comes up on me then, touching my shoulder. I jump to my feet, wheeling around and making a quiet, strangled noise of surprise.
“Hey, sorry, Jumpy.” He tries to meet my eyes, brows lifting in a question — an unspoken Are you okay? That I don’t bother to answer. He continues. “We gotta roll. I need to show you somethin’.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“You can come back if you want,” Duncan’s saying. “And if you want to bring more tents and stuff, that’d be cool. Or if maybe you’ve got an extra car? Or a trailer home? That’d be great.”
I’m not super sure if he’s being sarcastic or not. So I just say, “I’ll see what I can do,” and let Randy tug me away from the camp.
An absurd role reversal, Randy smooth and calm and back on the top of the world all of a sudden, but I’m too rattled to process my irritation.
***
“So what was that all about?” Randy asks when we get back into the safety of the truck.
I frown. “Julian thought we were coming to take him back to the Lazarus House.”
I don’t mention the other parts. Not yet. I want to hear his thing first.
“Yeah, the whole group of them apparently thought you were a narc at first.”
“Wait, really? You looked like you were getting along so well.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you won him over. Or maybe it was my charming personality.” He shifts in his seat as I put the truck into gear, and I notice that he’s got something in his hand, the size and shape of a ballpoint pen. He twirls it in his fingers, looking down at it thoughtfully.
“What’s that?”
“A sample,” he says. “Did you know there’s only one company that produces Lazarus?”
“Sure, yeah. Pyadox. There’s no generic formula. Zoe did a whole video about it.”
“Right. An’ one company means one supply chain. One factory, one fleet of delivery trucks, one set of warehouses. One point of failure. It’s pretty stupid, honestly. Like they’re begging to be sabotaged.”
“So what’s the deal with the pen?”
“Up-front payment for services to be rendered.”
I glance at him sidelong, one brow lifted.
“They gave me this one if I agree to help them get more.” He spins it around again thoughtfully, frowning. “Kind of shitty that these pre-filled Lazarus pens didn’t take off. That would’ve been a whole hell of a lot more convenient. Then again, never got the feeling they were real interested in our comfort or convenience.”
“I’ve never seen one,” I agree. Never when I was giving Dad his daily shots. Never when we were brokering deals with pharmacists and outpatients skimming their doses.
“I think it’s a promotional sample,” he says, squinting at the label on the side. “Like, you know the kind pharmaceutical companies send to doctors? Just before the point where they try to sweeten up the deal with a steak dinner and a back-alleyway handjob?”
“I’m not sure that last part is a thing.”
He shrugs. “Either way. That’s my guess. Elliot said they got it off a truck. That’s their whole system, actually. It’s kind of brilliant. They don’t bother stealing from the Lazarus House itself — he was saying some shit about how the stuff there is tainted, anyway? Like they tamper with it? — so they take it off trucks. Either stopping them out on the highway, or sneaking over when it’s being delivered.”
“Sure. What’s a bit of highway robbery among friends. A bit of casual breaking-and-entering. Some lighthearted sneaking past armed guards, probably.”
“That’s the spirit.”
I blow air out my nose, sighing an unconscious affectation now more than a biological reflex. I think about Julian, his wildly rolling eyes, and the weight of the reality if the things he said were true. “Julian says they’re experimenting on people in there.”
“That would explain the bad Lazarus,” Randy says, not sounding the least bit surprised.
It would explain a lot of the crazy shit my dad’s been saying, too, I think, and a wave of nausea rolls through me so hard I think I might have to pull over, but I swallow it back.
Randy pops off the safety cap on the Lazarus pen, examining the fine needle, no bigger than the point of a tack.
“You’re not using that in here,” I say, and my grip tightens on the steering wheel.
“What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is if you turn into a fucking monster, I don’t want you in my truck. Let me pull over at least.”
He grins. “Yeah? What are you going to do if I turn? Kill me?” A teasing brow waggle, and I hate that he thinks this is a joke.
“Stop messing around. Here. I’m pulling off.”
There’s a roadside rest stop up ahead, a faded sign bearing the symbols for a bathroom and a picnic table. The text below says WEIGH STATION - TRUCKS MUST STOP. I ease over into the right lane so I can take the exit, and Randy twirls the Lazarus pen between his fingers like a baton.
“What, exactly, did you agree to do for them?”
“There’s a guy to talk to for details. We’ll figure out the rest when we get to it.”
I decelerate onto the ramp. “What do you mean, we?”
I can hear surprise in his voice, genuine, the sly artifice dropping. “I mean, that’s what we do, isn’t it? We’ve got a chance to get back in business. In case you forgot.” He waggles the Lazarus pen. “It paid for this truck. It’s paid for your utilities. And, y’know, that little thing called, ‘keeping you from rotting on your feet.’”
“Here.” I stop the car. I peer around the parking lot, looking for other cars, but I don’t see any. “We can do it here. If you even think we should be doing it. Which I don’t think that we should.”
“This was your idea,” he counters, and eases the door open, sliding down out of his seat. He half-turns to shoot me a look, daring me to argue.
He’s right, but I don’t want to hear it.
I get out, putting the truck between us so I don’t have to look at him.
***
“Shooting up in a truck stop bathroom,” Randy says, pulling up the hem of his shirt. “Now that really takes me back.”
“Randy, if you’d ever done drugs in a truck stop,” I say, propping the bathroom door open with my body so I can keep watch, “you’d know there’s a difference between a truck stop and a weigh station.”
He wrinkles his nose. “Fine, if you want to get technical about it.”
There are long-haul truckers milling about out in the picnic area, smoking cigarettes and chatting up the weigh station staff. But there’s nobody at the bathroom, and even if there were, I doubt they’re paying much attention. Weirder things than this happen at truck stops and weigh stations all the time.
Unless, of course, he turns into a flesh-eating zombie and starts tearing through onlookers. They’ll notice then.
Randy picks out a patch of pale, fishbelly-white skin over his hip and pinches it. He looks up at me, brows lifted.
“Hurry up if you’re doing this,” I snap, irritated. “Or else just toss the syringe and let’s go.”
The needle disappears into his skin and he presses down with his thumb, auto-injecting the contents with a single smooth movement. There’s a sharps container on the wall across from the urinals, like there are in a lot of public bathrooms out here. Maybe because a quarter of the reservation is diabetic. Maybe for the Undead, or the h
eroin junkies — take your pick. But Randy lets the Lazarus pen drop on the floor instead, bald concrete sticky with ancient dribbles of urine and black scuffs tracked in from outside.
His eyes slide closed, and he tilts his head back, jaw going slack, and for a second I think it was really heroin in there, some sick joke from somebody who thought it’d be fun to swap out a label. But then I see it, a bloom of color rising in his cheeks, parched capillaries opening and flooding tissue, and I see his shirt flutter with the sudden ferocity of his heartbeat and the twitching pulse that comes alive in the hollow of his elbow.
He snaps his eyes open, and my muscles tense. Fight-or-flight is more habit than instinct now, too, without any adrenaline left to pump through my veins. Instead of a rush of endorphins, I just have a sick spreading dread that creeps through my body like dry rot, that twists up the empty places in my guts. He’s going to meet my eye and it won’t be Randy staring out at me, it’ll be something inhuman, some predatory reptilian brain pushing the buttons and handling the controls of its human vessel.
He’s going to lunge for me.
He’s going to rip out my throat.
He smiles, a lopsided grin that splits up one side, and the expression in his lidded eyes is one of utter satisfaction, contentment bordering on smugness. The shiner below his eye seems almost to fade, maybe just blending with the new color that’s rushed into his cheeks.
“Christ, that feels so much better.”
I hesitate. My gaze scans over his body, questioning, probing. I don’t know what I’m looking for. It’s not like his wounds are going to seal up, his skin knitting together. It’s not like something is going to burst from his body in a shower of viscera and gore. This isn’t some science fiction movie.
But there’s color in his complexion where there hadn’t been before, and the bruise on his throat is less visible, the edges softened, and the hollows under his eyes seem somehow shallower.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Okay? Shit, never felt better. Light me a cigarette, would you?”
“You know what they say about things that seem too good to be true?” I pull out two cigarettes, light both, hand him one.
“You know what they say about gift horses?” He takes it and draws in a long, drag, puffing his cheeks to blow smoke rings.
Chapter 15
I’m sitting in my bed, old laptop perched on my knees, browsing job ads in an increasingly frantic nightly ritual. I’ve been scrolling through listings for a long time, all of the words starting to blur together, prison bars of text across a white screen. The inside of my head is a low, dull roar, a white noise static of the same pointless circling thoughts: You can’t count on Randy for money. You’re not going to find a job sitting in the dark in your house. You have to get back out there. You’re going to get caught and put away. They’ll find out that you’re Undead. They’re talking about taking temperatures at the door now. They’re talking about doing body scans. It’s already happening in the big cities, and it’ll come to Los Ojos eventually. They’ll know. You’re running out of places to hide. You’re running out of options. You can’t count on Randy forever.
And, always, that persistent nagging at the back of my mind: You could call Chuy. You could take him up on his offer right now.
Randy thinks things can go back the way they were. He thinks we can pick up where we left off.
But I can’t see a way for that to be possible. Even if we follow Duncan and Elliot’s lead, stealing Lazarus like a pair of highway robbers — what then? Who will be left to sell it to? If all of our buyers end up arrested or killed or squatting in the desert, then how are going to pay the bills?
The Lazarus House might be doing pharmaceutical experiments, but at least they pay people for them.
Zoe’s silhouette darkens my door frame.
I look up, quickly shutting the laptop. “What’s up?”
“You weren’t looking at porn or anything, were you? Your door was open.”
“First off, ew. Also, no. I absolutely was not.”
“You closed your laptop really fast.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just…whatever. What’d you need?”
It’s hard to see her face, the light glowing around her like a halo. But I think I can make out something strange in her expression, some mixture of reticence and excitement.
“So…remember when you asked about the Undead Registry? And the whole suicide thing?”
“Sure.”
She hesitates in the doorway, takes a tentative step forward, and I scoot sideways on the bed and gesture to the foot of it for her to sit if she wants. She lingers, maybe measuring the awkwardness of being in her brother’s bedroom, maybe not wholly believing me about my laptop activities, but relents. She perches on the edge of the mattress and folds up her knees under her.
“What made you ask that?” she asks.
I shrug. “Just something I overheard at the Lazarus House.”
“Well, I looked into it. Or, I mean, the whole forum community kind of dug into it. We compiled a bunch of the data. And this shit gets weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“For starters — yeah, suicides are crazy over-represented. Suicide makes up, what, 2 percent of all the total deaths in the world?”
I have no idea, so I shrug again.
“Yeah, well, it’s about 30 percent of the Undead. That’s what you’d call really statistically significant.” She grins, then, and it’s such a bizarre choice of expression for the information that she’s revealing that I’m almost startled. “But it’s even weirder than that.”
“Okay…?”
“Come look.” She hops off the bed and starts for the door, clearly expecting me to follow.
It’s like when she was little and she’d build something in the backyard or draw something in a notebook and drag me out to admire it. She never showed her masterpieces to our parents — Mom was always too sick, Dad was never interested — so my opinion had to count for triple, but she always seemed happy with it. Thinking about that makes something in my chest hurt, some physical twang like heartbreak, but maybe it’s just my body starting to fall apart on the inside.
I follow her.
The inside of her room has always been decked out like the combination of a film studio and a police precinct, one wall dedicated to pinned-up photos and news clippings and sticky notes. I notice now that the arrangement on the wall is different than it was before, things in different places than they had been, the red string making a different design than usual, but none of it makes a lot of sense at a glance.
“Okay. So like I said, we dug into all the registration information. And it’s really basic, just ages and death dates and that sort of thing. Most of the personal information is redacted out. So we had to go through, and, like, manually check death records, and some of those were scrubbed so there was this whole thing and…well, never mind. The point is. Somebody had the idea to dig into the suicides to see if there was any sort of link, and it turns out that a lot of them had either been institutionalized at one point, or gone to a drug rehab, in the last fifteen or so years.” She points to some papers on the wall — lists of names, highlighted in different colors. The colors, I notice, match to sticky notes that run up one side of the wall. “So we go digging through the records of those facilities and sure enough, there are a ton more people listed on the registry who have a similar background. And there’s one company that keeps popping up through all of that.”
She traces a complicated web of string connecting several papers on the wall to a single point. It’s a company logo of a sunburst with the outline of a pill capsule at its center and the bold letters beneath it: PYADOX.
“The company that makes Lazarus? I didn’t even know they were that old.”
“Right? I don’t think anybody ever really heard of them before Lazarus came out. But it turns out they’re, like, this really old company. They were making all of these weird fringe treatments all th
rough the 1950s and 60s. Like psychedelic research and stuff for mental illness, then in the 90s they got really deep into some crazy genome stuff, stem cell research in the 2000s. Like, whatever the new cutting-edge controversial trend was, it’s like that’s what they were getting into.”
“But nobody’s heard of them.”
“Yeah. Because, like…I don’t think any of their stuff really worked. From what I could tell when I was looking, it seems like they were doing trial after trial and researching things that never made it to market, or didn’t yield any results, or — anything. Just chasing a bunch of dead ends.”
“But they stayed in business?”
She shrugs. “Yeah. That’s suspicious as hell, right? And that’s the other thing that’s super weird, is I was trying to look into it and follow the money, and there’s just…all of these angel investors and all of this secrecy, but also a ton of government grants? For things that don’t do anything? But yet they keep managing to get partnerships with these facilities, and selling drugs to them.”
“Okay, hang on.” This is making my head hurt. I never had Zoe’s appetite for conspiracy, maybe because I spent too long listening to Dad going off about crazy things. Or maybe just because I’m not as fast at putting things together as she is. “So what you’re saying is there’s this company that keeps selling experimental drugs to mental hospitals or whatever, and now people from those same mental hospitals are turning into zombies when they die?”
“That’s kind of what it seems like, yeah.” She finds a bare patch of wall to lean against, crossing her arms over her chest. Her glasses have slipped down the bridge of her nose, and she scrunches it up to try to push them back up. “I mean, this company that’s been on the cutting edge of every medical tech but never seems to make anything good — all of a sudden makes this miracle drug that happens to be perfect for treating Undead? That’s super suspicious, right?”
