‘I’m not in any position to argue,’ I said.
‘Come here,’ she demanded. The cat stepped gingerly from the meat case onto her shoulder and crouched there, tail switching. The room we entered was made for slicing things apart. Huge knives and saws lined the walls, an empty cutting-board table below them, stained with dark splotches. Drains in the floor would wash it all away.
A raw smell I thought was Grunta became stronger back here, sweetly rank. At the far end of the butcher shop stood the meat-locker door with a handle like a horizontal tavern tap. I almost reached for that handle, eager to break the vacuum seal, but instead Grunta led me into a meager office with an antique turn-dial television set, a few open TV trays with stacks of papers on them, and a human corpse seated upright in a rocking chair, slowly rocking. Milo was the source of the smell, and it was sharp enough to make my poor pointless epiglottis spasm.
The look of him made my heart pound hard enough to prove it was still in use. His ugliness was bearable, but what he evoked was not: negative spaces, black holes in human shape, maddening blurs to which your eyes refused focus, statues in flesh molded by some demon hand, oracles that announced with every twitch of their bones a vastness and darkness that no living brain could fathom. They could not be true but were. They attracted too many flies.
Grunta grabbed a plastic flyswatter from atop a paper pile and lashed at Milo’s head with it. The cat on her shoulder rode out this violence like a rodeo cowboy.
I could hear the flies buzz, like in the poem by Dickinson, that creepy little Amherst goth who wrote a hundred hymnals to the Dead. The TV was muttering afternoon news: A California commune of three hundred souls had finally, after much preamble from their high priest, tossed themselves like lemmings into the deep molten canyon that, a few weeks earlier, an earthquake had ripped through downtown San Francisco. They’d leaped one by one screaming, each of them, ‘Mother Nature forgive us!’ There had been no miracles to witness, no onset of the King.
Milo turned away from this broadcast and studied us both with the cool detachment that he must’ve reserved, in life, for fresh slabs of meat. His eyes were sunken and rheumy, and the skin on his face had tinted greenish, sagging so that his mouth arched downward like a Greek-tragedy mask. His hair, once a lush bloom of salt-and-pepper curls, was gone, and the flesh on his head seemed to have petrified into another layer of bone.
‘Milos, this man come to see you,’ Grunta explained.
‘Renfroe,’ I said. ‘We’ve talked a few times before,’ I said.
Milo winced and his mouth eased open, but he said nothing. Instead, he raised a litre bottle of vodka from between his legs and poured the last swill of it in the general direction of his mouth. Most of it trickled down his chin and seeped into the bib of moisture spreading downward from his undershirt collar. Beside the legs of his chair were other, empty litres of vodka, gin, Kentucky bourbon.
‘Drunkard,’ Grunta complained, as her chin quivered.
‘It kills some of their pain, the alcohol,’ I told her. ‘They crave it, I’ve noticed.’
‘Same as before dead for him, then.’
‘Does he speak to you?’
‘At first,’ she said. ‘No more. He is quiet now.’
In life, Milo would erupt with theatrical talk. He’d sweat and his face would grow ruddy. He despised his wife, harassed the young women who dared step into the store, wiggling sausages at them suggestively. There was always booze on his breath and a pistol under his cash register.
Made you wonder, but we’d all been musing lately on the Soul. You couldn’t avoid wondering, in the presence of these walking, talking human shells. It was the reason I came back to Milo’s Specialty Meats - for Dolly. Things were different. The universe had color and verve.
‘Let me just pay you now—’ I started, producing the chunk of money again.
Grunta snatched it out of my hands, the whole thousand bucks. She ran it under her nose to sniff it. It was real money and rather easily procured, though neither of us knew what it was worth any more. Cash had become hardly more than memento. It was supposed to represent gold in a vault somewhere, sure, but gold was just a kind of rock.
‘Uh, that’s actually a thousand,’ I told her. ‘But I’ll make you a deal.’
Gunta pursed her lips. ‘What deal?’
‘I’ll give you the whole grand for Dolly and all the booze you have left.’
‘What is Dolly?’
‘The dead girl.’
Grunta shoved the money in her pocket. She scratched the cat under its chin, and the cat eased its eyes shut. I followed Grunta back into the butchery and watched her snap open the handle on the meat-locker door. The automatic light came on inside, a harsh medical white. Bags of anonymous meat cuts were stacked on plastic shelves; a half dozen long beef sides hung on a track like suits in a bedroom closet.
At the far end of the room was a packing crate made of cheap wood and nails, like a pauper’s coffin. The girl inside it, I knew, was maybe nineteen or twenty, not more than a hundred pounds, barely five feet tall. She had less literal substance than the larger cuts of hooked meat around us, but this other flesh could not be revived like hers could.
The cat leaped down from her mistress’s shoulder and skittered out through the open freezer door. I asked Grunta for the biggest flathead screwdriver she could find.
When she brought it back she said, ‘What are you doing with this girl?’
‘Awakening,’ I explained. I slipped past her into the freezer, too eager now to batten down for questioning. When I leaned down beside the crate, both knees on the cold floor, Grunta jabbed her index finger into my shoulder to get my attention. Her breath misted as she said, ‘Tell me why you need this girl.’
‘I want to know what it’s like . . . to be dead. I want to ask her.’
Grunta snorted. ‘Ask Milos. It is nothing. No remembering. ’
I shimmied the screwdriver head into the crease between the crate and its nailed-down lid, slapped the handle with the palm of my hand to wedge it in deeper. ‘I want to take her on a trip,’ I said. I shoved down on the handle, and the crate nails screeched as they lifted out of place.
‘She might not wish to be with you.’
‘She can do whatever she wants,’ I said, ‘but I can keep her safe.’
‘What is safe meaning for a dead person, eh?’ Grunta asked.
I didn’t answer. I was breathing aerobically now. When the lid was loose enough, I slid my fingers between the nails. The cheap balsa wood crackled and buckled. Dolly was there, zipped inside a clear plastic bag that hazed my view of her. She was lying in a bed of ice packs, piled around her and sprinkled atop her limbs and her abdomen. I brushed aside those that covered her face and tugged with both hands at the zipper until it gave way.
There was Dolly’s face - white lips, cyanotic skin, paper-thin eyelids curved shut over the rounded half-moons of her eyes. A sleeping beauty, though frost had matted her dark hair in unseemly, petrified clumps. That luster would return, I knew.
‘Jesu,’ Grunta sighed. ‘You are not going to bugger this carcass?’
I stood up again, and I outsized her, screwdriver tight in my fist. I let Grunta listen to the way my teeth chattered together. I could see her eyes darting. She was wondering how she’d gotten herself alone in a freezer with a strange man and a corpse in a crate.
Behind her, dead Milo shuffled into the freezer doorway, mouth agape. He raised a limp hand to waist level and waved lazily at us. I offered the screwdriver back to Grunta, handle first.
‘There are some sick people in the world,’ I told her. ‘Especially now. See, before these troubles I was an emergency medical technician for the Port City area. When things began to go haywire, well, you can imagine the despair. People were afraid to die. People have always been afraid to die. But some people, they get so full of fear, so full of despair, they give up. Look at this.’
I unzipped the plastic bag all the way down to Dolly’s navel. She was n
aked as a newborn, modest breasts flattened almost boyish in her supine repose, but I paid only clinical attention. What I meant to show Grunta was to be found on both of Dolly’s forearms, but I lifted only the left, raised it carefully and overturned it to expose the inside length of her arm. A single purplish groove ran from her wrist to the crook of her arm, a foot-long deliberate gash. It was puckered, though the wound itself was bloodless now. Dolly’s fingers twitched as I held her hand. She was so utterly cold, my hands stung from the touch of her flesh.
I said, ‘Think of how lost she must have felt, to do this to herself. I don’t understand that kind of despair, but the minute I found her, I knew she’d be back. Heck, she herself must’ve known she’d be back. I had to help her.’
‘You are the person who brings her here to my shop?’
I nodded. Milo stood now beside his wife, dumb-struck, but less than two weeks before he had agreed, for the price of a thousand dollars on deposit and five hundred on retrieval, to let me store the body of a suicide girl in his freezer. He was the only man I knew with cold storage large enough to keep her, the loose scruples to do it for cash, and the gusto to hold fort while everyone else in the county split to the coast in fear of four horsemen.
I said, ‘She was one of the last emergency calls we got before they shut down local services. A security guard at the state university called it in. The school had been closed down for days, but somehow this girl sneaked herself into the library. They have private study carrels in the stacks, and he found her there with her sleeves rolled up and a razor blade. It was a mess when we arrived, though she’d only been dead for a few minutes. We were meant to bring her to the county morgue, but by then they’d already issued the incineration policy, and I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let her be destroyed.’
Grunta was scratching herself in the neck with the screwdriver, unamused.
I said, ‘Anyway, I think she wanted to come back. She took her own life in a place she thought was private, where she wouldn’t be found before three hours lapsed.’
Grunta gestured at Milo with her thumb. ‘He took only one hour for return.’
‘I’ve heard anywhere from one hour to a full day. Three hours is average.’
‘And this - this freezing is to keep her from walking dead?’
‘It was an experiment,’ I said. ‘And I think it worked, mostly.’
Grunta sneered at me. ‘Milos lets you keep her here? He agrees to this?’
I didn’t know how to answer, but my silence told all. Grunta turned on her husband and shoved him one-handed. He croaked some awful sound and reeled backward against a suspended beef carcass. The meat swayed, and the hook to which it was impaled creaked from the strain, but it didn’t drop.
‘You are lucky you are dead already,’ she barked at him. ‘Villain!’
The freezer chill was making my nose run, so I headed back to the stretcher waiting in the entranceway. I enlisted Milo to help me lift Dolly out of the crate. He took her by the legs, and I got a grip on the plastic underneath her shoulders, hoping it wouldn’t rip midtransit. We slid her onto the cot, bag and all, and I stuffed a dozen ice packs inside the bag alongside her legs and across her stomach. I didn’t leer at where the gentle slope of her pubic bone was grazed by a soft chevron of manicured hair.
Grunta led me to a loading bay and heaved up the paneled door with one arm, swinging the other as a hint for me to get out quickly. ‘Hurry,’ she said. ‘The bugs.’ I rolled the stretcher back to the ambulance with relative ease, locked it into place. The bugs were in my hair, crawling along the length of my jugular. I’d lost my beekeeper’s hat somewhere.
I worked quickly to load the alcohol I had also purchased - cases of imported Czech beer, five boxes of Russian vodka with the labels printed in Cyrillic. My coup was two entire cases stuffed with glass flasks of dark-green absinthe, wormwood infused, smuggled incognito in Heineken boxes. Myself, I didn’t drink much more than a glass of wine on special occasions, but I knew that Dolly would need all this painkiller to get by when she awoke.
Back on the road, an FM station aired the soundtrack of our foreshortened lives - the Doors, REM, Blue Oyster Cult. Christian radio had gone shrill, of course, overtaken most of the airwaves not reserved for hard news - and it was always hard. For once I was thrilled to still be alive and scheming. I was like an expectant father on his way to the hospital. I blared the siren and the lights for nobody else as I floored it back into the pestilence cloud. The bugs came at me in a green hail and popped and crackled on the windshield like a celebration.
Toward the coast, the end of the line was abrupt. Orange barrels and wood crossbeams blocked the road, topped with blinking yellow lights. The inbound lane had been breached, barrels tossed into the marshy ditches now drowned out by seawater, caught and bobbing with other garbage in the rushes. The road, broken and sand-strewn, pressed onward into the waves. A sturdy wooden welcome plaque remained, though it read only WELCOME TO. The rest was submerged in the sea, out of which peeked the upper floors of restaurants and vacation homes, windows half-submerged like the looming eyes of crocodiles. The boat storage lofts still held an armada of compartmentalized pleasure craft, though the units on the lowest visible floor were vacant, their boats most likely floating empty and silent miles beyond these washed-out barrier islands.
The flash storms came daily and savagely, pushing in like hurricane feeder bands from the east in twisted airstreams. Even now the sky brewed purple on the horizon, and I had to hurry.
I cut the siren and the engine, popped open the door. I pulled out the stretcher and the rails unfolded, wheels touching pavement. Dolly slept the same as I’d left her - but I unzipped the bag and took her hand and laid it out across my own open palm and saw that her eyelids spasmed while I watched.
I pushed the stretcher on past the broken barrier, decked out in my jacket and tie and slacks - not the suit of a pallbearer, but rather of a preacher, a baptist. I’d never known God, but I felt him there in the briny air pushing off the sea, the front guard of the coming storm. His resistance was in the sand at my feet, mucking up the stretcher wheels. Dolly jostled as we moved over the rough ground, her small breasts quivering, and I looked away from them, out to sea.
A hundred yards out, five men stood on the balcony of a drowned-out restaurant. The place was four-star nautical kitsch - weathered wood siding and fishing nets and buoys. Its balcony had become a kind of dock on the raised waterline. The five shirtless men stood there in swim trunks and cutoff jeans, watching me.
I pushed Dolly to where the ocean undulated against the pavement. The road I walked had become like a boat launch angling down into the sea. The gulls circled and dived nearby, a few touching down on a massive grey hump. It was like a smooth boulder rising up from the shoals. It was, I realized, a dead beached whale. Truly dead. The baffling resurrections seemed a curse for humankind alone. Everything else that died was dead.
Thunder bashed on the horizon. The force of it seemed drawn up from the primordial deep that man had never conquered nor would. But here I was heedless, driving Dolly into the sea as the water drenched my shoes and soaked upward through my pant legs. It was lukewarm water, heated, so the hack radio scientist claimed, by the sudden spike in volcanic fuss along the midocean ridge, abyssal mountain ranges many leagues beyond the continental shelf.
After I waded waist-deep into the water, I moved alongside Dolly’s body and unzipped the bag down to her toes, folded it behind her shoulders, and lifted her head into the crook of my arm. I wrapped my other arm around her hips. Her flesh was dimpled like plucked chicken skin, but I ignored the chill of her body and slipped her into the water. The ice packs scattered and bobbed around us.
The nimbostratus front line had begun to eclipse the sun and lay its shadows like an early dusk. I freed Dolly from her baggage and held her naked above the water, one arm beneath her shoulders and the other behind the backs of her knees. She was stiff at first, but every second her body relaxed it
self into my grasp. Her loosened knee joints lowered her bare feet down into the water. I waded out farther, my necktie draped modestly over her breasts.
The water came up to lap at my elbows and then to ease the burden of her weight from my arms. Lightning sputtered through the clouds, gilding their purple masses. Traces of that electric rush drove into the sea current. It shivered up through my groin and fired into my throat and made me laugh like God had finally blurted the punch-line.
My five-man Greek chorus had descended from their restaurant balcony onto a speedboat tied to the railings. One of them kept yanking the starter cord while the other four sat patiently in their seats. They were coming ashore ahead of the storm, skirting certain death. Or maybe they were already dead. Or they were live men coming for Dolly and me, eager to do whatever sick men do when laws no longer stifle their appetites.
I knelt into the oncoming waves and went under, kept my eyes open and felt that liquid-salt sting. I clenched her around the waist and pressed her chest against mine to keep her submerged where the amniotic warm could soften her chill. My lungs convulsed for air. My will dashed any whim I had to stay under and drown. My heart heaved blood through veins to remind me I was not yet together with the revenants.
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 27
