House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  “What the fuck,” Randy repeats, and that seems to break the spell, at least for a minute. He drops down from the truck and waves at the dazed human cargo. “Get out. Come on.”

  The people inside shift uneasily, and it’s hard in the gloom to make out any specific features in the crowd. They all blur together, a seething mass, a zombie horde. In the movies, the zombie horde is always hungry, always eager. But these Undead just look frightened and confused. There’s blood and bile and bits of people that have fallen off or been vomited up, the truck painted in gore.

  As my eyes adjust to what I’m seeing, even if my brain still refuses to make sense of it, I realize that many of them are missing parts of themselves. Arms. Legs. Scraps of torso, sides of faces.

  “Where are we?”

  “Is this New Mexico?”

  “They said they were taking us to a different facility. They said they were taking us to New Mexico.”

  Terror is giving way to confusion for some of them. When they talk, I hear hints of accents from places far from here. But I’m not paying much attention to that. I’m paying more attention to the way these people have been hurt. How many of them are injured, and how those injuries don’t all seem to have happened in transit. There are bandages and stitches on some of these broken parts, soaked through with red-black blood.

  Parts that were cut off after their death. Parts that were cut off of bodies that will never heal.

  “We’re here to help,” I say, stepping forward to drag out the loading ramp from the truck, grimacing at the sound of the metal scraping. It doesn’t matter. I extend a hand for the person closest to take. “But you have to hurry.”

  This was supposed to be a shipment of Lazarus.

  The first Undead takes my hand, meeting my eyes with a frightened gaze, blank-eyed and staring, not really comprehending.

  “What have they been doing to you?” Randy is asking, with a mounting mixture of anger and horror and disbelief.

  “They cut us up,” someone replies, a rasping voice muffled by the shifting noises of people in the truck. “They cut us up until there aren’t any pieces left. They need the tissue samples to study.”

  And that’s it. That’s the awful truth, the reality of it suddenly and terribly falling into place.

  Julian and Elliot and Duncan, all missing parts of themselves. The screams and howls in the Lazarus House, those rats in the walls. The experiment isn’t just to watch and see what happens when you take their drugs. Like good little scientists, they have to get their hard data. Of course they do. Tissue samples. Regeneration. Vivisection has been forbidden for over a century, but it doesn’t count if your subjects aren’t alive. It doesn’t count if your subjects can’t feel the pain of a knife. Never mind that we walk and talk and worry. Never mind we can still feel the pain of terror and loss. Never mind that whatever you do to us becomes a scar we’ll carry forever, a wound that won’t heal.

  I hear the weigh station door open, hear the surprised shout of the driver, but that’s not the thing that’s worrying me the most.

  Because in my peripheral vision, there’s a flicker of color, rotating beams of red and blue.

  “Goddammit,” Randy pushes past me, peering around the corner of the truck and watching the squad cars roll in. “Coalition. No way they came on accident. That motherfucker sold us out.”

  You know what they say about things being too good to be true.

  Duncan and Elliot, I think, caught by cops out on the highway — gunned down before they had a chance to run. Was that a setup, too? Is their connection playing both sides, happy to take our money and play along until we’re good and trapped? Maybe he didn’t think we’d be as speedy with the bolt cutters. Maybe he didn’t think we’d have the truck open and the cargo spilling out so fast, even as his cop friends come rolling in.

  Did he even know what was in this truck?

  Does he care?

  It doesn’t matter anymore, because we’re found out, and it’s a long run back to the car.

  ***

  The bobbing beam of a flashlight, the sound of approaching feet.

  “They’re coming!” Randy hisses, gesturing for the people to hurry.

  They’re climbing down, but moving slowly, bodies creaking and protesting and sometimes breaking in the process, leaving pieces behind: flesh that snags on exposed hinges, tearing free; skin that’s melded with the hot metal of the truck and rips away like tissue paper; limbs that snap with the jostling effort of many Undead shoving past and climbing over one another as fear ripples through the crowd, cattle preparing to stampede.

  It’s grotesque. It’s awful. And it’s necessary, if they want any chance at all of getting out of here.

  There are a lot of us, but the numbers don’t count for anything against the Coalition. Not when those officers have guns and training and body armor on their side. What are a bunch of unarmed Undead going to do? What can a horde of broken bodies do against a rain of bullets? Numbers aren’t an advantage right now; they’re a liability.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Randy mutters. He’s moved to the side of the truck, standing vigil as I try awkwardly to help people down, try to move them. We could cut and run, leave them here to fend for themselves. Both of us know it, surely, but we wouldn’t dare. I’m a coward in a lot of ways, but even I couldn’t walk away from this, not without trying.

  “They’re moving as fast as they can,” I say, trying to keep my voice low, calm, trying my best to stall against the mounting panic that’s threatening to send this scene into utter chaos.

  “Stop and put your hands where we can see them,” an officer yells. More lights flashing — they’ve called for backup. There’s got to be at least four armed officers on the scene now, and that’s not even counting whatever trouble the truck driver and the weigh station attendant could cause us if they decide to jump into the fray. We are out of time.

  “Run!” I yell, all pretense of sneakiness lost now. “Just go! Scatter! They can’t catch all of you!”

  I hope to god that’s true.

  I shoot Randy a look, and he looks back, hopelessness fading to determination, eyes going narrow and cold as he sets his jaw. In a split second, he’s made a decision, and as soon as he does, everything in his countenance has changed. He grabs for my hand, pushing the keys to the Mercedes into my fist.

  Undead are starting to run, a stampede that shambles past us on other side. A temporary body shield. An officer raises his weapon, taking aim, but the shot misses its target. Hits a woman in the shoulder instead, spinning her around, but she stays on her feet. Broken bodies can sustain a lot of damage. There’s another tally in that small advantages column: Until the brain is damaged or the body is totally destroyed, we can just keep soldiering on, miserable and broken and dessicated but stubborn as hell.

  “Get out of here,” Randy says. “I’ll stall them.”

  “You can’t —”

  “Go! Get them fucking out of here!”

  “They’ll kill you!”

  “They won’t,” he says, and fixes me with a lopsided grin. Something dark and determined and dangerous flashes in his eyes. “They won’t dare. But even if they did, I can think of worse ways to go.”

  The last people who are able to move are climbing down from the back of the truck. There are a few who aren’t going to make it, too broken and fragile to clamber down on their own, and I can’t think about that right now because I need to make sure that the others get out of here, I need to make sure that I can get out of here, I need to get back to Zoe, I need to survive even if it’s just through this night so I can know that something, anything, good has come out of this awfulness.

  I grab Randy’s shirt, balling the fabric of the button-up in my fist, and tug him close. I kiss him, my mouth on his, a quick and hungry and sloppy communication of all of the things that I don’t know how to say and don’t have time to put into words.

  I let him go and reel backwards, stumbling over someone who
has fallen into the dirt.

  Randy strides out away from the truck, directly out into the light, his hands held out to either side. He shakes his head, the hood falling away, his pink hair blazing in the dim light. He pushes his way out calmly to the front of the line, past the bodies that are surging and scrambling past.

  The last person in the truck is a kid, just a fucking toddler, one fist jammed in his mouth, the other clutched tight around some small filthy toy, and I grab him and throw him over my shoulder and we’re running. There’s no time to look back. There’s no way I can stay and watch, not if I want any chance at all of escaping this place. There’s no second-guessing or changing my mind now.

  “OY! Fuckers!” I hear Randy yell, loud, defiant in his confidence. “Do you know who my father is?”

  And then I’m too far away to make out what happens next. I can’t hear anything over the sobbing of the kid wheezing into my ear. My legs are screaming, my arms are screaming, and with every step I think I’m going to crack in two, but my bones hold.

  I haven’t heard any more gunfire, but I don’t know if that means much. I can’t hear much of anything through the haze of my panic and the kid sobbing on my shoulder, and besides, there are other ways to kill a man, ways that are quiet and terrible.

  But I have to think that he’s okay. I have to imagine that if anyone can talk his way out of this, it’s the politician’s son, the rich white kid whose story is so strange and so strong that nobody would hurt him until they knew it wouldn’t be their head on a platter if they did.

  The Undead have scattered. Some have crossed over the embankment and made a break out into the desert. Others are looping back around toward the highway. There’s no way to control their movement, no order to impose on them, and even if I could take charge I wouldn’t. The only thing that will save some lives now is knowing that a handful of Coalition officers won’t be able to chase after dozens of people all running in different directions. Let them shoot. Let them try to shoot us all in the head in the dark. Let them try to follow after us in the desert, running over sand and stone and cactus. Let them get tired and weary chasing after a prey that will never get winded.

  They’ll get some of us. But they won’t get us all.

  My free hand tightens its grip on Randy’s keys.

  I hear a woman screaming, sobbing, calling out a name again and again, and the kid starts to yell for his mommy and I think, oh thank god, at least I’m not taking him home, at least I haven’t adopted a kid in the middle of this. I let him down and double over, hands on my knees, watching him run unsteadily towards her, and the enormity of this all starts to creep up on me. The reality of what we’ve just done.

  I see them there together, mother and child, and my heart gives a sudden aching lurch. They are strangers to me, imported from some other state, dragged cross-country from some other facility or holding cell or prison or whatever people in places that aren’t Los Ojos do with people like me. But they’re not so different from another mother and child I know, a mother who Duncan protected with his body, a mother who disappeared when her companions were murdered out on the highway.

  The scrap of fabric in that kid’s hand, the filthy toy he’s been clinging to for dear life. It’s not a roadrunner. But it could be.

  The mother makes eye contact with me against the darkness and mouths, “Thank you.”

  “Go,” I tell her. “Hurry.”

  The Undead have scattered, and there’s no way to know how many will get away for good, how many will find one another or find some safe place to stay or find some way, any way, to rebuild, to survive, to find something like freedom. I’ll need to look for them. I’ll need to try to find them, to know for sure that this made a difference, but right now I need to get back to the car and get out of here.

  I need to get home.

  And I need to get packed, because home isn’t going to be safe to go back to much longer.

  ***

  It’s the only story the news wants to run this week.

  It’s everywhere — the local broadcast station, the city paper, social media. We’re even there on the national news, the first and probably only time that anybody has ever heard of Los Ojos, New Mexico.

  MASS BREAK-OUT OF UNDEAD DURING TRANSIT FROM SECURE TREATMENT FACILITY

  PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE’S SON: AN UNDEAD DIRTY SECRET?

  UNDEAD THREAT LOOMS LARGE IN SMALL SOUTHWEST TOWN, VIOLENT POLITICAL GROUP SUSPECTED OF LEADING ATTACK

  REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE EZRA LYNCH CAMPAIGN THROWN INTO QUESTION, SON APPEARS TO HAVE TIES TO UNDEAD TERRORIST GROUP

  The stories pile up, getting more outlandish with each iteration. I’m surprised but not entirely displeased to find out that I’m the leader of a clandestine and violent terrorist organization.

  The news footage rolls, and in some of the clips I can see Randy, his pink hair impossible to miss even in the background of a scene.

  Randy, cuffed and being led into the Lazarus House, the news ticker rolling at the bottom of the screen explaining how he’s being kept for questioning.

  Randy, glancing over his shoulder, smirking, making eye contact with the camera.

  Making eye contact with me.

  ***

  They send us Dad’s ashes, like they said they would.

  Or, well. They send us something, anyway. I guess I have no way of knowing whether the gritty white-gray powder is really my dad. Fragments of bone in it seem almost to sparkle, crystalline, the way that veins of quartz shine in a mountain face — so they’re someone’s bones. They could be whatever grit is left over from a mass incineration. Maybe Dad’s in here, or maybe it’s a mixture of all the Undead they’ve sent to burn.

  I guess, for this, it doesn’t really matter.

  If there’s something to be learned from being a walking corpse, it’s that your body doesn’t mean all that much about who you are.

  We drive up onto the mesa, our picnic spot that overlooks the town. It seems like the right place. The trees up here are mostly piñon and scraggy junipers, evergreens that doesn’t know about the changing seasons. But looking down on the town, I can see the patchwork of color, the oranges and yellows and greens and all those wide swaths of dusty brown. I can see the roads and buildings, the trailer parks and highways. A whole little world down there, kind of like the little world painted in miniature on the rock face of the mesa. All of it is quiet and still. Dad never talked about what he’d like done after he died. I think when he came back we all kind of forgot that one day he’d die again.

  It’s just the two of us, Zoe and me, and in a way, that seems right. I wish that Randy were here. I kind of wish that Ash and Jo and the rest of The Underground were here, too. But they’re our family now, in a sense that Dad never was, and it makes sense somehow that we would give Dad his last farewell here alone, closing the book on the last chapter of our old life.

  “It’s time,” I say, stubbing out a cigarette that I’ve been smoking slowly. I’ve spent the last few minutes just staring out over the city, thinking about all the people down there, shrunken down by distance, living their tiny ant lives. Thinking of the Undead in the desert, and Randy in the Lazarus House, and The Underground scattered in hiding. Thinking about how to make this right.

  “The wind isn’t very strong,” Zoe says, looking skeptically into the cardboard box and sealed plastic bag that holds what’s supposedly left of our dad. “I don’t think it’ll really, um. Scatter.”

  “Not that. I mean. It’s time to post that video. All of them. Everything you have and you’re ready to share — if you still want to go public, it’s now or never.”

  She looks up at me, confusion battling hope on her face. “What? Really? You’re not worried about being found out and…everything?”

  “I’m fucking terrified,” I admit. “But you know what you’re doing, right?”

  She shrugs, suddenly modest.

  “Damn right you do. So you tell me — what do we need to do to make that docu
mentary?”

  We spend the rest of the day planning, some ideas that aren’t going to go anywhere, some that we’ll need to do right away. We might need to leave the house behind. We might need to drive halfway across the country looking for answers. But we’re not sitting on this anymore. I’m not letting fear keep us in a cage. Not when the stakes are this high. Not when we’ve come too far now to turn it around.

  We’re showing the world what’s happening here, what’s happening to us. We’ll force them to pay attention.

  And whether it takes a lawyer or an army or an angry zombie horde, we’re getting Randy back, too.

  About the Author

  T.L. Bodine writes dark fantasy and horror of all kinds, from the zombie novel RIVER OF SOULS to the Wattpad-exclusive gothic, THE HOUND. She’s interested in uncanny, fantastic things, and the way real people with real problems interact with them.

  When not writing, she can usually be found watching horror movies, playing story-heavy video games, or experimenting in the kitchen.

  She lives in New Mexico with her husband, David, and two small dogs.

  You can connect with me on:

  http://www.tlbodine.com

  https://twitter.com/glassratmedia

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  Also by T.L. Bodine

  River of Souls

  https://www.amazon.com/River-Souls-T-L-Bodine-ebook/dp/B07ZLYZ1XD