House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  What if he was causing trouble because they were hurting him?

  I roll over onto my side, curling into a protective ball, trying to block out the noise with a pillow. But it doesn’t do much for the noise in my head, which is a competition between the snowy white-noise static and a relentless cycle of thoughts and images chasing around in circles.

  I screw my eyes shut and try to silence the thoughts.

  When I open them again, the light has shifted on the wall, the glow behind my black-out curtains changed in color and tenor. I must have fallen asleep, but I don’t remember; I don’t remember visiting that place I always seem to go in my dreams, that little island of light in the deep void of nothing.

  I reach for my phone. Dial Randy’s number, and get no answer.

  I send a text instead, weighing the words carefully knowing that they could be intercepted: “Did you still want to do the thing?”

  I hit send, hesitate a moment, then send: “I’m in.”

  I watch the corner of the screen, waiting for the ‘read’ notification, forgetting to breathe. But it pops up, and I exhale a sharp hiss of relief.

  A moment later, his message pops up: “About damn time.”

  Chapter 20

  We agree to meet up at a 24-hour diner because I need to get away from the house for a while but I can’t stand the thought of Randy’s sad bachelor apartment on top of all the other misery. Besides, in all the movies, the grand capers and heists always get planned at a place like this. Maybe they’re onto something.

  It’s a greasy spoon place, the kind frequented predominately by truckers and homeless people, and there are some of both there tonight. A homeless guy sits at the bar, wearing too many layers for the ambient temperature, slowly drinking a cup of coffee. The trucker has pulled his cap down over his eyes and is lightly snoozing in a corner booth, waiting on his food to arrive. It’s an off-hour of day, not quite lunch rush, no longer really breakfast, so I’m not expecting many other patrons. All the same, the waitress takes her sweet time with checking in on our table, which actually suits me fine.

  “So what happened to change your mind?”Randy asks me after the waitress has walked away with our drink order — two waters and a pot of coffee to share.

  “My dad died,” I tell him, because he needs to know and because I need to practice saying the words aloud until they make sense to me. “Forever, I mean. This time.”

  “Oh.” A silence, hesitation. “He was kind of an asshole, right?”

  He was, he absolutely was, but hearing Randy say it sends a shiver of anger through me. Some kind of instinctive reflex to defend him. I can talk shit about my family, but nobody else gets to do it for me — that’s the rule, unspoken but universal. Or at least it should be. Then again, Randy’s dad is a politician, and that twists all the rules. Maybe at a different time I’d cut him some slack; maybe I’d even be sympathetic at how much it must suck to have your family be right there in the public to get dragged through the mud. But right now, my emotions are an exposed nerve in a raw, gaping wound, and I close them off and seal them up deep inside because I don’t want to share.

  “He was my dad.”

  “Okay, okay, fair ‘nuff.” He raises his hands, a sign of surrender. “But you’re in?”

  “Yeah. Kind of. But, um…” There’s an impulse to explain everything, to share every fresh anxiety and regret, to tear open the ugly scab healing over my fresh grief, but I can’t. I think he’d understand. Maybe better than anyone, Randy should be able to understand what’s going on in my head, which is why I can’t bring myself to say any of it. Not now. Later, maybe, when this is done, when we’ve finished everything. And there is a lot to do. “Where were you yesterday? I came by your place. On my way…when I drove out there.”

  “Oh. That.” He grins. “Well, as it happens, I was meeting with somebody who might just be able to help with exactly the problem that we are having.”

  The waitress is back with a tray loaded with water, mugs and a coffee carafe. She asks if we want any food. I order a breakfast burrito, thinking I might bring it home for Zoe. Randy asks about the pie options, listens with relish as she lists them all, and then says he’ll think on it and might order a piece later. I’m tempted to kick him hard under the table but I hold it in.

  “As you were saying?”

  “Right. Yeah. So remember how I had that chat with Elliot before…everything?” He makes a vague hand gesture meant to envelop the concept of ‘everything.’ I nod. “Right. So he gave me the information for his connection, who it turns out is a weigh station attendant. Every truck that comes through there has to stop and be weighed and have its papers checked, which means that any delivery coming through that corridor of highway gets diverted to the weigh station.”

  “Including the Pyadox trucks.”

  “Precisely. So this guy’s got routes, license plate numbers, arrival times, the whole nine. Elliot would figure out the relevant information and set up a trap, using the bridge as a choke point. A whole Robin Hood act. Kind of over-the-top if you ask me, but hey, whatever works.”

  “It didn’t work out too well for them after all,” I remind him, thinking of the news story, the photo of their corpses.

  He shrugs. “Well, it worked out fine every time until it didn’t, right?”

  That’s not a comforting thought. “How do we deal with the driver? I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  “I had a feeling you’d say that.”

  “It’s a valid concern.”

  “Sure. So we skip the trouble and just do it at the truck stop. Get him distracted and out of the truck.”

  “How do we pull that off?”

  “Money talks.” He shrugs. “I think I can work something out. It won’t have the dramatic flair of a highway robbery, mind you…”

  “All the better.”

  The waitress is back with my burrito. Randy tells her he does want the pie after all, ordering cherry — warm and a la mode, of course — with a good-hearted wink, and this time I do kick him.

  “So why the sudden change of heart?” he asks, leaning forward on one elbow. “I mean. I get the thing with your dad sucks, but…?”

  I glance around. The trucker is now shoveling a plate of bacon and eggs and pancakes into his face. I doubt he cares much about listening in. And the homeless guy is too far away, even if he cared, which I doubt. All the same, I keep my voice low. “Zoe really thinks there’s a chance we can make something happen if we get hold of a sample. Like, if we could get it to a scientist, get the formula leaked, something like that. She thinks that’s a way to hurt Pyadox.”

  “Do you think that will work?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I think. But…” I prod at the burrito, like it’ll make any difference to the waitress whether I pretend to eat it or not before I ask for the box. “I keep remembering what you said. About who’s going to kill me when my time comes. And for a while I thought, maybe I’ll just turn myself in. Maybe that’s the way to save anybody I care about from getting hurt — I can just go into the Lazarus House and disappear.”

  “But that didn’t work for your dad,” he says, softly.

  He reaches a hand across the table, covering mine, and I let him even though my body tenses up at his touch. There’s a lot we still need to talk about. There are things about us — our relationship, or whatever this is — that we’re going to need to address and repair. There’s still some of that barrier between us, that semipermeable membrane, and I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t.

  But this, at least, this specific thing, is something that he understands. And it means something that he does.

  “I don’t know what happens without the Lazarus. I don’t know how long I’ll have before I start to fall apart without it. But if having it means I’ll have more time to figure everything out, then that’s what I have to do.”

  The waitress comes back, and this time I’m grateful for the interruption. Grateful no
t to have to try to explain any further, to self-examine any deeper under the scrutiny of Randy’s dark eyes. My thoughts are straying back toward my dad, and that’s not a safe place for them to be right now. I have to keep busy. I have to stay focused on the plan, because that’s what’s going to get me through these next few days.

  The waitress leaves, comes back a moment later with a check and the boxes, tut-tutting at the melted ice cream soaking down into the pie, at the mostly-full coffee carafe. Randy slides her a big bill and assures her we won’t need any change. I put my wallet back in my pocket, too slow on the draw.

  “So this change of heart,” he says, and a hint of a sly smile creeps back into his face. “Is that just about the Lazarus or…”

  “One thing at a time.”

  ***

  We knock out the finer details of the plan, absurdly, while carving pumpkins on the living room floor. There are only four pumpkins to the five of us — me, Zoe, Randy, Jo and Andrea. So somehow I’ve gotten stuck with the clean-up part, the scooping-out-guts part, while the others sketch out designs and alternate between discussing the plan and making small talk as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

  “It’ll give us something to do with our hands,” Zoe had said in defense of her idea, and she’s right. There’s something almost soothing about keeping my hands busy as we talk through the plan and its contingencies. But I can’t shake the feeling that the real reason we’re doing it this way is so we have something to hold onto if it goes bad. One last memory.

  “So we keep Zoe at our place,” Jo’s saying, twirling a marker between her fingers. The sugar-skull design she’s drawn on her pumpkin is going to be painfully complex to carve, but I don’t know if she’s thinking that far ahead. “But it’s a just-in-case thing, right? Like you definitely are planning on coming home after? No offense, just making sure I’ve got the plan.”

  “Yeah. If everything goes correctly, we get in, we get the Lazarus, we leave before anybody really notices,”I say, picking seeds apart from pulp and spreading them out on a tray. I can’t eat them and Zoe doesn’t really like them, but it seems like a waste not to roast them all the same. I’m feeling a sudden aching camaraderie for Lilith and her stress baking.

  “That’s one perk to doing this at the weigh station instead of messing with the Lazarus House. No fences, no armed guards, no bullshit.” Randy frowns down at his own pumpkin, fidgeting with the paring knife in his hand. Sinew moves beneath the ruined skin of his knuckles. “And, considering the time of day, there really shouldn’t be a lot of bystanders to have to try to avoid, either.”

  “For the record,” Andrea says, “can we just acknowledge how sketch it is that they always get their Lazarus shipments into the facility in the dead of night?”

  “It is a little weird,” Randy agrees. “Although, I mean, Wal-Mart stocks at midnight or whatever, right?”

  “Sure. But it’s not like there’s customers to avoid or anything? I don’t know. It just seems really weird.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll see. Everything goes according to plan and in a couple of days we’ll all be back here talking about exactly how weird all of this was.”

  And if it doesn’t go according to plan, of course, maybe we’ll never be here like this again

  ***

  “You ready?”

  It’s late, and the highway is dark. The only world that seems to exist is the one inside the glow of the headlights. We’re in the Mercedes. Randy figured it would be faster, in case we need to make a getaway. The trade-off is that it’s flashy as hell, so we compromise by deciding to park a little way past the exit, pulling the car off onto an access road, and walk the rest of the way up an embankment to the weigh station.

  There was a time when walking up this hill would leave me puffing and out of breath, smoker’s lungs protesting with the effort. But now my body just complies, hauling itself as tirelessly and relentlessly as its weathered joints will allow. So I guess that’s one mark in the “Undead perks” column.

  It’s a pretty small column.

  “All right. So. The truck gets here at…” he glances at his phone “…11:45, give or take. The attendant calls the driver out and into the office area to go over something about the paperwork, or whatever excuse he thinks up on the fly. That gives us a few minutes to get the truck open, grab some Lazarus, and get out.”

  “And if the truck is locked?”

  Randy pulls something out of the pocket of his hoodie — a small pair of bolt cutters. “If he’s bothered, which I bet he won’t, it’ll be a padlock. I was looking at the truck model online last night and that seems to be the consensus about keeping it secured. You got the box cutter?”

  “Yep.” I grip it hard in the pocket of my own hoodie. We’re assuming the Lazarus will be shipped and stored on pallets, plastic-wrapped and stacked. There’s no way we’ll make off with a lot, but even if we just cut through and get one box, that’ll put us in way better shape than we’ve been in.

  The parking lot for the rest area is mostly empty. There’s a few scattered lights, but there’s plenty of shadows. Good news for us — we’ll have places to hide. But bad, too, if there’s anyone else out here lurking. There’s no one, I tell myself, even as I look behind me again, paranoia tingling its way up my spine. Why would there be?

  The weigh station building sits on one side of the parking lot, with the drive-through scale area beside. A separate outbuilding houses the bathrooms, with some picnic areas between. Behind it all, in the dark, the embankment slopes down into the desert, dirt and gravel and scrub separating out the space from the access road where we parked. We settle in a shadowed spot just over the embankment, a little ditch filled with bits of trash blown over from people picnicking in the rest area.

  “This is the kind of ditch my grandma would tell me not to play in,” I whisper, trying to get in a vantage point where I’ll be able to see the truck coming. “La Llorona will get you. That’s what she’d say.”

  “Well, if La Llorona is the worst of our worries, we’re doing all right.”

  I fall silent, watching the road. Headlights flash occasionally on the highway, but nobody pulls off at the exit. Time slows to a crawl. It feels like we’ve been out here for a million years, but when I ask Randy he says it’s been less than ten minutes. I hold my breath. My heart is still. In the perfect silence, crouched here in a ditch, I’m hyper-aware of the desert. The smell of the sagebrush beside me. The distant yipping howl of coyotes. The rushing noise of tires over concrete passing by on the highway.

  “I don’t think they’re coming —”

  “Look!” He elbows me in the side, pointing. A pair of headlights at the off-ramp, and then it’s rolling in, a box truck, and my first thought is: Just how much Lazarus do they go through that they need a truck that big to ship it all? The truck is unmarked, the kind of nondescript vehicle that you pass a thousand times in a year traveling up and down the interstate. I used to see trucks like this all the time pull into the pumps at the Kwik-Gas I worked at and never gave a second thought to what they were carrying or where they were headed.

  It’s weird, now, to think of how much hope I have riding on the contents of this one.

  Randy leans forward, tilting his head to listen better. The signal will be the driver door opening. If the driver doesn’t get out — if our friend in the weigh station office can’t lure him out or decides not to do it after all, bribe or not, then we’ll bail. That was the agreement. We’ll try again or come up with some other plan.

  I’m keying myself up for that, bracing myself for the disappointment, running through the possible alternatives, when I hear the door open and slam shut. When I see the movement of shadows beside the truck, hear the indistinct sounds of the driver talking to someone.

  Holy shit, I think, feeling that hollowness in my chest where my heart should be pounding. He’s actually doing it.

  And then Randy is up over the side of the embankment, hissing at me to
follow, and I climb up beside him. We cross the space quickly, quietly, watching for any eyes on us. But the coast seems to be clear; just like we planned, we’re all by ourselves out here. The driver’s inside the weigh station building, a closed door and some distance between us. Just a couple minutes to cut the lock and pop open the truck and we’re free.

  I stand watch as Randy hops up onto the back bumper and snips at the cheap padlock holding the door closed. So far so good.

  He has to jiggle the handle a few times to loosen it, but then it’s free, and the roll-up door creaks and rattles open.

  Chapter 21

  “What the fuck.”

  The back door of the truck slides open, a shearing creak, and even though we can’t afford to stand and stare — even though we have only seconds before we’ll be found — neither of us can move. Randy’s gone wide-eyed in horror.

  I don’t know quite what I was expecting. Crates and boxes, probably. Shrink-wrapped pallets filled with little padded containers of medicine vials, their sides splashed with “keep upright” and “fragile.” But I do know what I wasn’t expecting, and seeing it here feels so awful, so impossible, that my brain’s threatening to seize up in defiance against it. Like if I just shut down right now, power off like a robot, I won’t have to see and process and understand what I’m looking at.

  But I don’t have that option.

  I have to see this.

  The back of the box truck is filled with people.

  Or, to be more specific: Undead. There are dozens of them, maybe close to fifty, crammed in like cattle. Cattle trailers are least have those slats on the side, ventilation holes for them to breathe and peek out wide-eyed at the highway. These have been left in the tight, airless dark. A smell like sweet rot rolls out of the truck like a plume, an earthy stench like fresh compost and decaying slime.