by T. L. Bodine
“Randy, we’re already dead,” I say, exasperated. “What do you think is going to change? What difference is it going to make? I’m sorry your dad fucking sucks. Mine does too! But there’s nothing you or I are going to do to change that, and it’s not like…it’s not like we’re going to take some Lazarus and just magically live forever! You say you don’t want to die again, but what you’re doing is going to get us killed.”
“I’d rather die with a bullet in my brain than wither up and rot like some kind of forgotten meat. Is that what you want? Do you wanna just dry up until you can’t move an’ shoo away the birds pecking out your eyes? You going to wait til I get that bad an’ then it’s you with the rock this time?”
“That’s not fair.” I flinch, the image of Julian flashing through my mind, searing into my thoughts. But I’m thinking, too, of the others, their bodies sprawled on the highway. I’m thinking of the armed guards patrolling the Lazarus House.
Randy pushes. “Who bashes your brains out when your time comes?”
I don’t know for certain what was really happening with Julian — if his fate, his withered body, is the inevitable consequence of going without Lazarus, or some experimental result, the effects of Pyadox’s pharmaceutical tinkering. But I do know for certain what happens when the Coalition finds you. I know for certain what lies at the end of the road Randy is proposing that we walk down, a risk I was willing to take when I was certain there was no other choice, a risk I can no longer justify now that I know there’s even a slight chance of some other option.
I set the beer down on the floor, rising from my seat. “Fine.”
His eyes narrow. He stops pacing and waits. The air between us grows cold.
“You want to get yourself killed by the Coalition, fine. You do that. But I’ve got people in my life who rely on me. I can’t be running around like your crime buddy anymore. I’m out.”
“People.” He snorts derisively. “You don’t have people, Davin, you’ve got one sister and she’s got way bigger balls’n you. She wouldn’t run away like this because she got scared.”
“You’re right. She wouldn’t. And that would be stupid of her, and maybe that’s a good reason why you shouldn’t be around her anymore.” My heart should be pounding right now. My body should be flooding with adrenaline. But it’s not. It just feels sick and wilted in the absence. It feels shaky and hollow and spent. I realize I’m by the door, now, and I don’t even remember moving toward it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not going to stop you,” I say, the words forming themselves in my mouth. “But I’m not going to be part of this. And if you’re going to do it, I don’t want you coming around anymore or pulling me into it. I’m out. I’m done. We’re done.”
I don’t want that to be true. I want him to come to me, to apologize, to bargain. I want him to beg for me to stay.
But he just glares at me, cold and defiant. “Fine. Then get out.”
“Fine!” I step back and grab the door knob, forgetting it’s locked. I fumble with the lock, burning and trembling in turn. You don’t get a cool-guy exit in real life; you don’t get the dramatic final line. I manage to get the door open and linger in the doorway, hesitating a spare second, waiting for him to tell me not go, and then I’m out into the darkness.
***
Who’s going to do it for you, when your time comes?
Instead of sleeping, falling into that nothing void of dark at the shores of a vast and empty black sea, I lie in bed and try to imagine how it must have felt to be Julian. To be trapped in a body that simply would no longer move. To lie in the desert, parched and baking in the sun, birds pecking at your eyes.
I pull up Chuy’s number on my phone and start typing out a message, then stop. Read over what I’ve written.
Copy it, save it down in my drafts.
Not yet, I think. It hasn’t gotten that bad yet. I don’t have to decide right now. I’m out. I’m safe. I can wait it out and maybe I’ll still find a job somewhere, maybe I’ll come up with some other plan. Maybe nothing will ever come of the Lazarus withdrawal. Maybe I won’t be like Julian after all. But if it gets bad. If I don’t have anywhere else to go.
Then I can send it. Then I can surrender.
***
When you’re a kid, you think you always know when your parents are hiding something from you, and you resent them for it. You want them to trust you enough to let you in on the secret. You want them to believe in you enough to think you can handle the truth. What you don’t realize is that you’ve only scratched the surface of what they’re hiding. It’s not that they’re hiding just a few small truths; it’s that you’re only catching glimpses of the places where their defenses have already cracked. The world is so much bigger and more terrifying than you can realize at the time, and the greatest privilege of youth is being shielded from it whenever and however possible.
Or, anyway, that’s what I tell myself.
I don’t tell Zoe that I know those guys from the newspaper. She fills me in with details about their deaths like she does with every Undead news story and I pretend that I don’t know anything about it, pretend that I’m hearing everything for the first time, because I’m not ready to talk to her about this yet. I’m hoping that, maybe, I’ll never have to talk to her about some of what’s happened, some of what I’ve seen. Because she deserves to be shielded from it — or because I’m too much of a coward. Either way, it all ends in the same place.
I take her to the bank on Monday.
She’s suspicious, like she’s expecting this to be some kind of setup, but she also knows better — as Randy would say — than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Because she’s still a minor and I’m her legal guardian, I have to be on her account. But I promise that I won’t touch her money, and we bicker about ground rules: about the money, the videos, the fans. I have no idea what rules are appropriate. It’s not like anyone gives you a handbook for this sort of thing. So mostly I ask questions and raise objections and let her come up with the way to fix them, and it all sounds good enough to me.
It’s fall now, true fall, and the colors have changed in the mountains. It’s patchy down in Los Ojos proper, but there are still pockets of color. You can see the gold in the cottonwood trees growing on the river bank. The imported ornamentals, the fruit trees landscapers love to plant outside banks and apartment buildings, have gone crimson. It’s not exactly cold — it’s still in the fifties during the day — but there’s a bite of chill to the air, that specific scent of fall.
Instead of going straight home, I take the long way back, slow-rolling through what passes for downtown. There are Halloween decorations up in shop windows. The chile roasters outside the grocery store have been replaced by huge cardboard boxes bulging with pumpkins. In a few weeks, they’ll have blocked off Main Street for the vendors and the mariachi music and the dancing, people selling sugar skulls and painting faces for money. The Day of the Dead hits a little bit differently now that the dead don’t always stay that way, but I guess like most holidays the celebrations are more about the aesthetic anyway.
“Davin?” Zoe’s looking at me sidelong, like she wants to ask something but is scared to. There’s some of that frightened rabbit in her again. She’s wearing her birthday shawl, the perfect defense against the not-quite-cold, and she adjusts it around her shoulders. “Something happened, didn’t it? Or something’s going to happen?”
“Things are weird with Randy,” I admit, because that feels safe to tell her, and it’s true.
“Did you two break up?”
“I’m not entirely sure we were ever dating.”
“You were definitely dating.”
I shrug, admitting defeat. “Well. I don’t think we are anymore. I don’t know.”
“That sucks.”
Silence blankets back over the truck, and I pull into the grocery store parking lot on a whim.
“When was the last time we carved a pumpkin?�
��
“What?”
“A pumpkin. When was the last time we carved one? For Halloween?”
“Oh, shit, it’s been a while.” Her brow furrows, thinking about it. Then she puts on an impression of our mother that’s heartbreakingly accurate, “They’re a waste of money and just an excuse to make a mess. Why buy something just to cut it up and let it get moldy?”
“Well now we have to.”
She grins. “Do you think R—” stops herself, course-corrects, “Jo and Andrea would want to come over? We could turn it into a party.”
“Hell yeah we could.”
We buy four pumpkins. Zoe insists on paying for them, and I tease her, calling her ‘big spender’ and ‘high roller’ and she eats it up because even though she’s seventeen, even though she’s twice as smart as I’ll ever be and the internet’s leading expert on Undead conspiracies, she’s still just a kid, and I want that to be true for her as long as I can.
Chapter 17
I call Randy the next morning. It goes to voicemail.
The next time I call, the phone rings and rings, but doesn’t connect. Eventually I hang up. I send a text instead, just a noncommittal “Hey” to test the waters. I sit waiting and watching for the ‘read’ notification and give up eventually. If he’s got me blocked, if he’s going to be childish about not talking to me, then fine. I’m done. I’m feeling bad about how we let things end, but I’m not chasing after him. Not even to say goodbye.
I doze on and off throughout the day. Zoe doesn’t say anything about it, but I figure she’s just assuming I’m moping about the breakup. She’s probably pissed at me. I don’t know what any of this means for The Underground. Does The Underground even exist anymore? We used to be united for a single purpose — we used to exist to keep each other safe and flush with Lazarus — but what does that even mean now? Ash didn’t want to be involved with Randy’s shit anymore. He said as much. Delilah’s shutting down the coffee shop and she and Jo are breathers; they can walk away any time they like. Andrea? Who knows. Maybe we’ll split right down the middle, one of those breakups where you take your friends with you. Maybe Jo and Andrea would take my place in Randy’s inner circle, and I’d go back to being alone.
It doesn’t matter.
I’m out. I’m out of that world, and I don’t have to go back.
Julian was just one guy, one fringe case, and there’s no guarantee that things would have turned out like that for anyone, no indication that I’m doomed to the same fate. It was a fluke.
A fluke — that’s what Randy said about Javier, too.
So which is it? Does taking Lazarus turn you into a monster, or does not taking Lazarus turn you into a mummy?
And if it’s both — if it’s becoming a monster or rotting away piece-by-piece into dust — which is really worse?
Even if Pyadox is using experimental Lazarus formulas, does it make much difference? It’s not like there’s another option. I could sit out here and wait to fall apart from Lazarus deficiency, or I could go get paid to do it on the inside. Chuy said it’s a good job. He said they’re taking care of him and sending money home to his family. Even Julian said he’d been given an option. He consented to be a lab rat in exchange for the money. And, hey. Maybe some good will come out of it. If they’re really running experiments, if they’re really using the Lazarus House as a way to study the Undead instead of just keeping them locked up and off the street, then maybe they’ll figure out better ways to help people.
It’s the right choice. It has to be the right choice.
I hear Zoe rustling around in the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans, and I think: I should get up, I should go talk to her, I should tell her everything. I’ve never kept so many secrets from her in her life, and it’s stupid to think that it’s even possible to keep secrets from somebody whose whole life is about turning over stones.
I curl up in bed, cocooned in my blanket, and feel feverish.
It’s not fair. I didn’t even use the Lazarus when Randy did. I can’t blame this feeling on withdrawal. It can only be some kind of grief.
I got sick once, withdrawal from Lazarus when I was so stupid I thought I could ration it, when I thought I could do everything by myself. Randy came, he swooped in like a savior and he gave me my drugs and brought me back to the living and I thought that made him my savior. But what if he hadn’t? What if I’d wept my bloody tears and sweated out that dark ooze, like that liquid that pools at the bottom of a refrigerator where the meat’s all spoiled — what if I’d stayed in bed and weathered the storm and come out on the other side realizing that everything was fine?
What if there had never been any Underground? What if there had never been any Lazarus distribution network, any deals in shadowed parks, any gunshots cleaned and sewn in bathrooms? What if I’d never had to see someone turn into an animal and rip into someone’s body like meat? If I’d never had to hear the sound of a skull crushing under the weight of a stone?
Would that have been better? Or would it have been worse?
Violence or decay. A bullet in the brain or a body crumbling to dust. Everyone dies, and everyone dies alone, so what difference does it really make how you get there?
The microwave bell dings in the kitchen, and I hear its door open and close. Zoe takes her food and pads down the hallway. I hear her footsteps stop in the hall, an uncertain lingering, and then her door opens and closes and soon enough I hear the sound of keys, the sharp clickity-clack through the wall.
I fall asleep, or what passes for sleep, and dream of nothing.
***
The phone rouses me, and I grab for it clumsily, not looking. It’s Randy, I’m certain, and I answer through a fog of sleep. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Montoya. This is Lara Santana from the Lazarus House.”
I sit up in bed, something hollow dropping through my core. There is an absence in my heart, a place where it should be beating frantically with sudden terror, but all I can feel is the reluctant sludge of old, dead blood creeping like oil through dessicated veins.
It’s early. The light at the edge of the window is pale and gray. I’ve slept through the night without realizing.
“I’m so sorry. There’s been an incident. We’re going to need you to come down.”
An incident?
What does that even mean? Images flash into my head, muddled. My dad escaping, fighting, hurting someone. A clench in my ruined guts. Would they refuse to let me work there because he’s such a troublemaker? What if they’re going to make me take him home, I think, with a kind of sleep-clogged logic. What if they’re going demand that I take him back? The whole scenario plays through in my mind, the impossibility of it — me and Dad and Zoe and Randy, all smashed absurdly under the same roof, my dad and Randy drinking cheap beer and puking up their rancid guts, some twisted funhouse sitcom vision. The whole idea is so awful, and so ridiculous, that it almost makes me laugh.
Except Randy wouldn’t even be here. I’d forgotten. Dad’s going to come back and fill his space and time will revert back and it’ll just be me and Zoe and Dad and it’s going to be just like it was before except somehow even more awful.
“Mr. Montoya? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah. Yes. Sorry. What’s this about? What did my dad do this time?”
Hesitation on the line. I can just make out that electric hum of static, of breathing. “It’s really best if you can just come talk about this in person with one of our staff —”
“Just tell me what he did so I know what I’m walking into for once. Please.”
“Mr. Montoya, I’m very sorry. Your father is dead.”
An absurdist laugh tears out of my throat. Is this a fucking prank call? Of course he’s dead. Obviously he’s dead. He’s been dead for years, that’s why he’s there. But —
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m following you. What do you mean, ‘dead?’”
“If you can just come down —”
“What happened?”<
br />
“There was an incident with a staff member —”
That word again. Incident. My mind is racing with ideas of what that could mean, of how an “incident” could lead to my Dad being a deader corpse, what could possibly bridge that gap between walking-dead and forever-dead, but really all I can think about is the way he looked that day on the couch, the tilt of his head and the crusty froth of vomit around his mouth, the way finding him dead in the living room had seemed both so inevitable and so devastatingly unreal. The image plays on a repeat loop in my brain, a white-noise buzzing threatening to overtake my senses, and I realize I’ve missed some of what the lady on the phone is saying. I struggle to parse her words, but they’re more sound than meaning.
“Yes, I understand,” I say into the phone, speaking on autopilot. “I’ll be right over.”
She says some more things, a buzzing fly against the plane-engine drone in my head, and I drop the phone onto the bed without disconnecting. It bounces, the screen flashing a confused beacon, then going dark as she leaves the call. I stare across the room. This feels like the worst of Lazarus withdrawal all over again. Alone in a darkened bedroom, the world tilting away beneath me as my thoughts go blank.
But I don’t get the terror or the reprieve of lost consciousness to save me, here. Just thoughts looping like a scratched record, infinite repeats without meaning.
My dad is dead.
My dad is really dead.
Forever dead.
Pulling the marionette strings of my corpse takes concentration and effort, and right now all of my thoughts are focused inward. I can’t move and think at the same time. I sit and stare.
I can’t put a word to the emotion fluttering through my ruined gut. Is it grief? Is it fear? Is it…relief? A guilty, twisted relief, an oppressive weight being lifted but only because the thing causing that weight has been snuffed out entirely. No more phone calls. No more fielding his insanity, no more delusions, no more worrying about him escaping or attacking or…
