by T. L. Bodine
“I wouldn’t call it perfect,” I mutter, thinking of Javier, of Gail, of the madness in their eyes. Thinking about Julian, trapped in a decaying body. Thinking about the way my own body feels, and how it felt even when I was taking Lazarus every day. How it never made me feel alive, just slightly less dead.
Zoe ignores me. “So anyway, I think it’s pretty obvious that Pyadox has something to do with the Undead. Like, they created the Reanimation Virus somehow. And then gave it to all of these people.”
“Okay, cool theory. Except — how did I get it, then?”
“Well.” She hesitates, like she hasn’t really thought that part through. “The Reanimation Virus is a retrovirus, right? That’s its whole thing, is it changes DNA. So maybe they did something to Dad, and you, like. Inherited it.”
“He never even went to rehab, though.” Randy did, I remember suddenly. He’d said that.
“He had to do that mandatory AA thing after he got all those DUIs.”
“Okay, sure, but I was already born by then, so. That’s a dead end.”
“Okay. Well then — it’s contagious. It got loose. That’s not the part that matters.” Her shoulders are rising, chin creeping up. She tightens the grip around her chest, body going on the defensive. “I’m onto something here, Davin. We don’t have all the pieces yet, but this is huge. This could be the thing that blows it all wide open.”
I stare at her conspiracy wall, the pieces laid out and labeled and connected in ways I can’t really entirely wrap my head around. She’s always been the smart one.
“What do you think would happen,” I ask, tracing a fingertip along the New Mexico map she has pinned in the center of the wall, “if a pharmaceutical company specializing in really experimental drugs had access to a whole population of people who didn’t have any rights or protections. What do you think they’d do?”
“…Whatever they wanted.” She sighs, moving to flop down in her office chair. She pulls her knees up and spins, looking thoughtful. “I wish we’d kept some Lazarus. What if we could get it to some kind of scientist, leak the formula they’re so secretive about? That’d hit Pyadox where it hurt, right?”
I don’t tell her that I know exactly where we could get hold of some. I just don’t see the point. What are we going to do? Find some scientist, analyze it in a high school laboratory, start making bootleg versions? Seize the means of production and take down big pharma? Get real. I can’t imagine it’s that simple, because surely if it were then someone would have done it already.
***
The story breaks in Friday’s news:
Two Undead, detained and neutralized on the Rio de Animas Bridge
The two men were detained by Coalition officers after attacking a truck driver en route to the Lazarus House treatment facility outside of Los Ojos, New Mexico. Specific details of the altercation have not been released to the public, but it appears that these were rogue Undead that may have escaped the facility. The Coalition is working with local law enforcement and tribal police to continue the investigation.
It’s all over social. I see it first in the paper Dad used to work for. He could have been the one to break the story, in another life.
I don’t have to look at the photograph to know who it is, but it’s there anyway. Two bodies sprawled, ruined heads blurred and pixellated, but I don’t need to see their faces to recognize the missing arm, the unusual silhouette of the caved-in chest.
***
We pull into camp, with its sad lean-to shelter, its trampled brush and autumn-crispy weeds. No one comes to greet us.
Gail is gone. The other woman is gone. The kid is gone. I never even bothered to learn their names, and now I probably won’t get the chance. They didn’t say anything about them on the news, but that doesn’t mean much. The news wouldn’t say anything about a camp, Undead women and children living in the shadow of an old oilfield. It wouldn’t fit the narrative.
Maybe they got scooped up and sent to the Lazarus House. Maybe they’ve moved on, scattering like dust in the wind, finding some other place to stay now that their leaders are gone. But whatever happened to them happened in a hurry. They didn’t bring anything with them.
There are remnants of the camp left behind where they had been: the blacked-out husk of an old oil drum where the fire had been left burning. A mess of tarps and blankets, a half-ass attempt at a tent strung between spindling trees. The place seems abandoned. Randy’s pawing through a heap of garbage, probably looking for more Lazarus, and I’m about to get annoyed at him for acting like a junkie when I hear the noise.
A dry, whispering rasp. A voice like air being pushed by a bellows — chuff, chuff.
Randy and I exchange glances, and I move toward the sound, curiosity overwhelming caution.
There, huddled against a stony outcropping, is the shape of what had once been a man.
Julian’s mummified skin has begun to peel. Putrid black oozes from between the cracks. His lips are missing. His nose is partially gone. Both hands are gone now, leaving the yellowed bones of both arms poking through fleshless wrists. Two big black birds take wing as we approach, fluttering awkwardly and loudly into the sky, and I think I see a part of him go with them, a long pale strip of leather peeled from an exposed thigh.
He can’t talk anymore, just lets out a rattling wheeze.
But his eyes roll in their sockets, round and staring, fixing on us as we approach.
“Jesus,” Randy breaths, taking a step back. His eyes have gone wide, the whites showing in a pale rim around his dark irises. His throat bobs, adam’s apple sliding under the bruised skin, swallowing back fear or disgust — I can’t tell which.
I crouch down next to Julian. Hesitantly, I reach out a hand and lay it against his shoulder. “What happened?” I ask, not expecting him to be able to answer but wanting to ask anyway. Feeling like I need to say something. Acknowledge something. Wishing he could tell me, one way or another, what had happened. If the others got away. If they left him here — or were taken.
It’s hard to tell whether he’s smiling or if the skin has just dried taut into a rictus grin. His teeth are yellowed and bare.
I give his shoulder a gentle squeeze. My heart seizes up, like a fist is clutched around it. “Is there anything we can do?”
His eyes track sideways, looking past me. He looks at Randy, then back at me, expression unreadable. He lets out a hot, wheezing air sound, a rattle of dead air, but there are no words carried on it.
“Randy. Go check the truck. I think there’s a water bottle.”
He makes a vague, strangled noise behind me and then shuffles backward, at a loss now even for a witty retort. He comes back a moment later with the half-sized casino water bottle, warm to the touch. The plastic’s probably leeched a dozen carcinogens into the water, but at this point I don’t think that really matters.
I cradle Julian’s head with a hand and trickle some water into his open mouth. His tongue, a shriveled purple strip of leather, snakes out over his bared teeth. It curls and seems almost to swell, a snail-like protuberance, and I wonder for a moment if he can even fit it back into his mouth.
His eyes roll up again, and I think I can read a request in them, so I give him more water.
Julian coughs, a rattling death-wheeze, and his eyes flutter closed. He falls still, and I stay crouched, uncertain, that heart-clenching tightness growing tighter like squeezing a ball. I don’t know if he’ll move again.
“Finish…it.” He manages, finally, his voice more breath than sound. His eyes open, rolling once more in their sockets, looking past me.
Not at Randy, I realize, turning to follow his gaze.
But at a rock, an uneven chunk of sandstone about the size of a basketball, half-buried in the dust.
“No,” I breathe, and my hand closes on his shoulder almost convulsively, squeezing so hard I’m worried the brittle bones will snap under my touch. “No way.”
“Finish me,” he says, breath hissing, and
the force of the request pushing past those dead, cracked lips and bare skull teeth is frightening.
“This is so fucked,” Randy says. There’s an edge of something like hysteria in his voice.
The fist that’s tightened around my heart loosens. My guts drop instead, the bottom-out feeling of dread and horror too big for words. I barely know this guy. He’s certainly not somebody I would consider a friend. But the intimacy of the request is as undeniable as its monstrosity. When someone asks you something like this, you can’t say no. You can’t turn them down.
“Randy,” I say, in a voice that doesn’t sound like it belongs to me. It sounds far-off, like a ventriloquist throwing his voice, an empty sound that echoes and rattles through my body but doesn’t belong there. “Bring me the rock.”
“This is so fucked,” he repeats.
But I hear the shift of dirt, the sounds of effort as he pries the stone loose from the sandy bed where it had sunken. He comes beside me, cradling the awkward package in both hands, holding it like a football he hasn’t decided whether to throw. His shoulders are hunched with the weight of it, a weight far past the ten or fifteen pounds of the sandstone itself.
“I’ll do it,” he says.
“What?”
“I said I’ll do it.”
“Randy, you don’t —”
Julian lets out an impatient whine, a frustrated back-of-the-throat noise. His bare-bone wrist scuffs in the dust, an involuntary spasm.
“Wait at the car,” he says, and I meet his eyes. They’re narrowed now, the whites retreated, a hardness crossing his pale features and drawing taut across his cheekbones, his lips pressed down to a thin line. “An’ don’t look.”
I give Julian’s shoulder a final, comforting squeeze before stepping away, reeling backward from the impossible horror. We shouldn’t be here. We should never have come. It’s my fault that we’re even here, that we even met Julian, that we even learned about this place and its awful secrets. But Randy’s stepping forward, lifting the rock over his head, and I have to move fast if I want to miss it, I have to nearly run, feet sliding and shuffling in the loose sand, and I just make it to the door when I hear the sound like a half-rotted melon smashing against a curb, and I’m bent over double beside the truck and my heart has gone still but my stomach heaves, heaves, useless and empty.
I cough up something dark and slimy and spit it out on the ground. I stare at it, focusing on it hard, trying to shut off all my senses, but it’s not enough to keep me from hearing the stone fall a second time.
Chapter 16
Randy stops coming around to our house after that. Days pass without hearing from him, and I’m catching myself making excuses when Zoe asks about him. I don’t want to tell her about everything that’s happened between us — the awkwardness of the incident in the car, the awfulness of what happened in the desert. They say you can lighten a burden by sharing it, but sometimes the horror just spreads and grows and replicates instead. Sometimes trauma is a virus, infinite copies in infinite hosts.
He doesn’t come around, and he doesn’t answer his phone, so I drive out to check on him after the third day.
Randy lives in an apartment complex near CJ’s, one of those pockets of “rich” neighborhood that sit in islands of decay. The route to his place takes me past a used tire store, a carniceria, and a neighborhood where the cars are parked on the street and a basketball hoop with no net sits at the end of the cul de sac. But Randy’s apartment itself is nice, gated off, a three-story building that stands conspicuously tall against its surroundings. There are padlocks on the dumpsters, and someone pays the water bill to keep grass growing, although now it’s mostly gone yellow-brown. The ornamental fruit trees planted by the perimeter are starting to turn, their leaves going red-gold.
Randy’s car is the nicest in the complex, but at least it probably won’t be broken into here.
I make my way up to his second-floor unit and stand outside of it for a while, trying to get up the courage to knock. The thick black-out curtains on his windows are missing, replaced by eggshell-colored blinds. I wonder if his landlord said something. This seems like the kind of place where they care how your windows look.
It takes a while for him to answer, and when he does, he just unlatches the door and steps back from it, inviting me in with a gesture. He looks tired. He’s shirtless, and the dark bruise around his throat stands out lividly against the creamy paleness of his skin. The wounds on his side — the bullet wound I had sewn together so long ago now, the broken ribs that were fresh, the abrasions — look a little better. Not oozing fat, at least. Barely weeping fluid.
His apartment looks like something has been nesting in it. There’s a sagging futon in the middle of the living room, flanked on either end by milk crates filled hodge-podge with books and random papers that leak out the sides. There’s a gaming console and a television and a scattering of blankets and discarded clothes. There’s a fist-sized hole on the wall by the kitchen.
“I’m probably not getting my security deposit back,” he says, following my gaze.
“Has that got a story behind it?”
He shrugs. Instead of answering, he examines his hand, the place where the skin has sloughed off over his ruined knuckles. “You know what the first rule of dealing is, Davin?”
I don’t answer.
“You’re not supposed to get addicted to your product. That’s the thing that always takes the junkies down — they get hooked, and they get sloppy, and then they get caught. Fucked up that we don’t have any other choice, huh?”
He goes into the kitchen and returns with two slightly-dented beer cans. He offers me one and I accept even though I know I won’t be able to keep it down. It’s nice to have something to hold. He picks up an overturned chair and sets it down across from me, straddling it backwards and resting his chin on the back like a child.
“So are we going to talk about what happened?”
“You always say we should talk about things,” he says, opening his beer and taking a defiant swig. We both know he’s going to puke it up later. “But I don’t think you mean it. I don’t think you’re a guy who talks about things, Davin.”
I roll the beer can between my palms, frowning down at it. “Were you still going to try to go through with it? The Lazarus?”
“Is that your way of saying that you don’t want to?”
A flash of memory, the last thing in the headlights before my car ran off the bridge: A figure crouched over roadkill, tearing at its skin with its hands. Except I know her name, now. I know that her name is Gail, and that she used to be just like us, and now she’s not and maybe she never will be. I know that there were people who watched out for her, and now they’re dead, because they were trying to get the same drug that turned her into a monster.
The wet sound of a stone cracking through a rotten skull. The way the skin pulled tight and dry across Julian’s bones, and the way his wide eyes rolled in his head when he begged us to finish him. Abandoned in the desert — abandoned, or just overlooked by whoever or whatever befell the rest of his people.
Two Undead, their faces distorted, brains oozing out of their skulls. Neutralized. Dead on the pavement like so many others before them.
My dad, huddled and suspicious and rambling on his bed.
There are no good paths here. Every choice is just some new kind of horror.
“I can’t,” I tell him. “I can’t be part of this anymore. No more drug deals. No more crime. No more digging into mysteries. I’m out.”
“You think you can just quit? You think you can duck and hide and everything will go away? There’s a dead mummy in the desert who shows real clear what the price is for not taking any risks, in case you forgot.” He finishes his beer and crumples the can, the tendons in his ruined hand straining through the shredded skin. “Have you thought that far ahead? Because I don’t think you have.”
He pushes back from his chair and begins to pace the living room, making a ti
ght circular path between the chair and his kitchen. He’s agitated, shivery. Angry, I think, but that’s not all of it. The Lazarus is working its way back out of his system. That dose wasn’t enough to trigger a full-on withdrawal, but it’s enough now to leave a path of agitation through his body.
I stay silent, watching him. Waiting for him to let it out of his system.
“You don’t understand.” His voice is heavy with a promise of pent-up anger, steam building up behind a release valve. “I can’t do that again! You don’t know what it was like for me, being all alone. For hours I hung there, and nobody came for me, and nobody cared. I thought I was in hell, Davin. I woke up and I thought I was in hell because the church was right all along — because I killed myself, because I’m a faggot, because I’m a sinner, pick your fucking reason — and my eternity was just going to be swinging there all by myself with nobody to care.”
He’s right. I’m always saying that I think we should talk about things, but now that it’s actually coming out in the open I realize that I don’t. Not at all. Something starts rising up in me, some volcanic combination of anger and pity and sadness and hurt, and I’m just sitting stock still in the chair trying to keep it all swallowed down.
“But it wasn’t hell. It was worse than that. The maid came along eventually and she cut me down and do you know, she yelled at me? She just said, ‘Oh, Randall, how could you. Don’t you know the shame this will bring on your family! Your father will never forgive you!’ That’s what she said to me. I was dead and the only thing that fucking mattered was my dad. He didn’t even talk to me that night. He didn’t even acknowledge what happened. He couldn’t look me in the eye. And you know what, that wasn’t hell either.”
He stops his pacing, glaring at me.
“Because that’s the thing, Davin. That’s the whole thing. I was dead. I was dead. And nobody gave a single goddamn. Because everybody dies alone. And there’s nothing on the other side of that. You saw it too — you had to’ve. You die and it’s nothing and I can’t do that. I can’t fucking die again.”
