He stared at the noose for moment but didn’t wonder why it was there or how he’d become entangled. It no longer mattered. He was free now to follow the bidding of the Chest Thing.
***
The Chest Thing spoke in Blue. He couldn’t see its voice with his eyes but with his mind. Rich, deep Blue and light Blue. Transparent Blue surging back up to an opaque Blue.
He paused from pulling fruitlessly on the front door handle and looked back over his shoulder. He turned and shuffled into the hallway, and then peered up to a strip of discolored wall.
Blue.
Heeding the Chest Thing, he returned to the door and resumed pulling on the handle. He began again to squeal and groan in frustration.
He stopped pulling when the door lit up in an electric wave of Blue. The Blue enveloped the wood and spread over the walls and floor. It raced up his arms and through his head. The Chest Thing thudded in excitement and babbled louder in Blue.
When the wave disappeared, he found he could understand the Chest Thing better. It ordered him to lean on the door handle instead of pulling it outward. He did so, and this time when he pulled, the door flew open.
Hissing in glee, he lurched out into the night.
***
He passed others walking down the street. Their Chest Things also addressed their hosts in Blue. They grew brighter as he neared and dimmer as he moved away. Most were being told to walk in a particular direction, toward a single goal. But his Chest Thing told him to walk another way. He followed its orders without question.
Soon, he came to a building with two open garage doors. A man in yellow overalls crouched beside a red truck festooned with ladders and reflectors and chrome. The man’s Chest Thing didn’t talk in Blue. It spoke in Red. The man didn’t look up from twirling a long metal rod at the truck’s wheel.
The Chest Thing said, Blue.
This translated to an order to silence the Red.
He reached for the man’s throat. But before his hands could make contact, the man sensed him and turned his head.
“Hey, what are you…” His voice trailed off as his eyes widened.
The words meant nothing to the Chest Thing. Meaningless sounds.
The man stood up and backed against the red truck. The metal rod clattered at his feet.
Red, the man’s Chest Thing thumped. Red!
Blue hands—Blue!—closed around the man’s throat. The man tried to pull them away, but the Blue hands were too strong.
“I ain’t gonna fucking die tonight!” the man babbled in his wind-speak before the Blue fingers crushed his windpipe.
The Blue hands released him to drop to the floor.
The Red slowly faded from the man’s Chest Thing. In time, it would also speak in Blue, but he wouldn’t stand here and wait for that to happen. Other Blue tasks needed attending to.
Chapter 10
PAULA
Paula forced herself to put How to Save Your Marriage back onto the living room bookshelf. She hid it behind a row of her romance novels so Jeff wouldn’t see it when he came home from Sammy’s Grocery.
“There. Now be happy.”
She started by pulling out the edible massage oil and lighting two candles in the bedroom. Next to the candles, she placed the red pepper chocolate they’d been too distracted to think about earlier. And she checked that the condoms were within easy reach under Jeff’s night stand.
Wait a minute. Jeff hadn’t used them. Did that mean…
She closed her eyes, daring to hope. Maybe Jeff wanted a baby, too. Or maybe he’d been careless. She vowed to discuss it with him soon. Tonight.
But that would lead to asking him to move home full-time. Was this the night for that, when he was tired, and they were both keyed-up?
“You’re driving yourself crazy. Stop it.”
Except she couldn’t stop it. She was already grabbing the decorative pillow off Jeff’s side of the bed. Her moves were so practiced, so efficient from the past two months that in no time she was fishing Jeff’s old bottle of Armani Code out of the bathroom medicine cabinet.
“He’s back, Paula. Stop it.”
She put the cologne bottle back—but only because she spied the fresh one in Jeff’s toiletry bag, not yet unpacked after the flight home.
She spritzed it onto the pillow and took a deep whiff of the lemony aroma. Tried not to recall how many times she’d performed this ritual.
In the living room again, she placed the pillow in Jeff’s easy chair and sat down across from it. She regarded it solemnly.
“Jeff, I want you to leave your job. I know, it’s a lot of money, but I don’t care. You were gone for two whole months. I’ve been all by myself. All I have is a pillow that smells like you. Please. Baby, if you love me, please. Stay home.”
An ugly brown pattern swirled and looped across the pillow’s face. During Jeff’s absence, she’d imagined the two swirls at the top were his eyes, the soft fringe around the edge his beard after a few days of not shaving. He was only relaxed enough to let that happen when he was home with her. But she couldn’t see his face there tonight. The real thing had just been here, and this damn pillow was only a pillow.
So she switched gears. The pillow was now her BFF, her bosom buddy lending a supportive ear.
“You think he’ll go for it?”
The pillow withheld judgment on her planned speech. But the bosom in the phrase bosom buddy gave her an idea.
“You’re right, more boobs.” Jeff loved them, so she might as well use them. She adjusted her robe to show more cleavage over her lingerie.
She took a deep breath and began again. “Jeff, I want you to leave your job.…”
When her second rehearsal was complete, Paula decided it would have to do. She gratefully threw her plush BFF into the corner.
Time to break out the red wine. She got up to head to the kitchen.
As she passed behind the couch, a blue line of light swept through the room. It didn’t make any noise. Her first thought was headlights, but then she recognized it as the blue light she saw in the bedroom. Like before, she felt goosebumps, and her heart began to race. But this time, she also staggered under an onslaught of dizziness. She grabbed the back of the couch until it passed.
Stronger. It’s stronger this time.
She ran to look out the windows. But there were no vehicles with headlight beams. No one pointed a spotlight at the house.
Maybe it was drugs. As a pharmacy technician, she knew how certain chemicals could produce hallucinations and heart palpitations. Had there been something in the eggs she ate? In Jeff’s cologne?
Shadows moved in the graveyard to her left. Was the caretaker having a party over there? What was going on?
She backed away from the window. Her heart was slowing down, thankfully, but not by much.
Jeff, Jeff, why don’t you come home?
She at least needed to call someone and report the blue light. Maybe this was a weird type of electrical storm—odd because it was a clear, moonlit night—but she didn’t know how else to explain it. Had she imagined it?
In the kitchen, she picked up her cordless phone, pressed 911, and then the green TALK button.
The phone dialed into silence.
No dial tone. Shit. She tried again and received the same result.
A second later, all the lights in the house winked out.
“Stay calm, stay calm.”
Maybe she should retrieve the cologne-scented pillow and just chill out. Have that glass of wine.
Except the blue light…should she be worried? And why wasn’t Jeff back yet?
The sound of a window shattering in her kitchen decided for her.
She ran into the kitchen. Someone had broken the lower window pane on her back door. The intruder was reaching for the interior handle.
Paula screamed and backed away.
With the lights off, it was brighter outside than in. She could clearly see the shape of a tall, obese man—the contours of
his jowly face and bald head.
Was that—
Yes. A detective from the police department. Paula recognized him from when she dated Kelton. Now she saw the police badge hanging from the breast pocket of his blazer. It wasn’t a burglar; he needed help.
She remembered his name now. Inspector Clay.
“Inspector?”
Inspector Clay finally managed to unlock the handle. He pressed down on it, and the door swung open. He moved clumsily as he stepped inside, like he was injured.
“Inspector Clay.”
She reached for him, intending to hold him up. He must be wounded. It probably had something to do with the blue light.
But then the electricity came back on, and she saw the way his eyes were rolled back. His great bulb of a head had the pallor of chalk. He scowled and reached for her.
Paula screamed and reeled back from his reach.
Inspector Clay moaned. He kept coming for her.
Oh, dear God.
She ran. Her first instinct—to go into the bedroom—she realized was the wrong one. But her thoughts moved a split second behind her body. She was already in there and slamming the door shut behind her.
The window. She was on the first floor and could climb out. She unlatched and raise it. A metal screen was on the other side, but that was no problem. She could raise the clips and—
Shit. Clay was turning the bedroom door handle. Already had it partway open. Too late to slam it shut on him.
She scrambled into her open closet and closed its shuttered doors.
Again, dumb mistake. She realized it was too late to do anything about it. She was a sitting duck.
Footsteps shuffled across the bedroom carpet.
Paula tried to hold her breath but did a lousy job of it.
Hands fumbled at the wooden slats of the closet door. Inspector Clay succeeded in lowering one like a venetian blind to look in. Paula craned to stay out of sight.
A second later, he let the slat go.
Silence. Maybe she was home free.
But then a body crashed through the flimsy door, and it wasn’t Inspector Clay at all but a longhaired woman in a white cocktail dress. She reached for Paula. The two of them tumbled over the broken mess of hinges and wood.
Paula screamed and tried to crawl away.
The woman grabbed for her ankle, raking up a ribbon of flesh from Paula’s calf with a broken nail. Paula screamed again and kicked her in the face.
She struggled to her feet. Inspector Clay was there after all, stumbling toward her from the hallway. More people crowded behind him.
Jeff, Jeff! Oh God, where are you?
She ran for the window. It was open now, with only the bug screen in the way.
Paula dove headfirst through it.
***
Athletics were never her strong suit. Bosomy girls tended not to enjoy high-impact activities like running, so at twelve years old, after a frustrating tour through soccer, softball, and field hockey, Paula joined the Junior All-Girls Swim Team. She stuck with it, placing in a few competitions, despite the constant teasing from her flat-chested teammates about her “floatation devices.”
Then, at fifteen, she met tow-headed Tommy Wickers, who told her swimming was stupid, and she believed him because Tommy was just so darn cute. So she quit swim team and took up smoking because Tommy was a smoker. The luster only wore off Tommy Wickers when she lost her virginity to him. That experience was so painful, awkward, and yes, anticlimactic that it did more to discourage her from further experimentation—at least for several years—than her repressively Christian father ever could. She quit smoking soon after quitting Tommy.
By that time, unfortunately, the luster had worn off swimming as well, and she never got back into it. She sometimes still lifted weights at the Y. But every time life took her for a loop—like when her parents died, or when she dumped Paul Kelton for Jeff Trent—she fell out of the habit and went right back to battling her weight.
All this by way of saying that when she dove through her bedroom window, Paula didn’t roll with it like a ninja. The metal screen buckled and twanged as it broke free of the frame with her passage. It obscured her vision so that her lawn caught her completely by surprise when her head smashed into it.
She came to a few seconds later and realized she’d passed out. It felt like someone had crushed the crown of her head with a sledgehammer. Her lower back ached.
Scrabbling sounds. Above and behind her.
She looked upward—and ooh, that was a mistake, too, as her strained neck muscles protested. She saw Inspector Clay with his upper body hanging out the window, reaching for her.
He appeared…dead. A walking corpse. Was that possible?
More shuffling sounds, more moving shadows across the street in the graveyard. She had to get out of here.
Groaning against her aching head, neck, and back, Paula staggered to her feet. She caught herself when dizziness threatened to send her again to the ground.
Behind her, the fat police detective withdrew from the bedroom window. He was probably headed for the door.
Paula ran.
Pebbles from the asphalt street bit into her bare feet. Cool fall air opened her thin robe and blew it behind her, exposing her negligee. Not that she cared at this point if anyone saw. She looked back to make sure no one followed her.
Sammy’s Grocery was on the far side of the cemetery—right through more dead people—but the police department was only a few blocks in the other direction. She could cut through the neighbors’ lawns on Spruce and Hickory Streets to get there faster.
She passed some homes with all the lights on, filled with moving shadows and screams. Other houses remained dark and silent. A Rottweiler lunged at her and collided with a fence. It barked until she was well past it. Paula wondered if it was protecting its yard or begging for help.
In a few minutes, she neared the police station, totally out of breath and sore. A car had T-boned another one in the Jonathan M. Borrelli traffic circle, in front of City Hall. In the car that was hit, the driver hadn’t worn her seatbelt. She hung halfway out her side window. Spikes of glass impaled her lower body where she’d burst through. Blood streamed down the outside of the door and pooled on the pavement—and Paula saw she was still moving.
She came closer, not sure whether to help, wondering where the fuck anyone was who was supposed to.
The woman raised her head as Paula neared. Hissed and reached for her.
Dead. She’s a dead woman. Still moving.
Paula backed away, careful to avoid the broken glass with her bare feet. She continued to the police station.
Now that panic had marginally loosened its claws, she tried to think. The blue light. The dead people—or nearly dead. Surely, they were related. Jeff being late.
As she rounded the street corner to the police station, she found rioters were attacking it. It was the strangest riot she’d ever seen. The people didn’t make a sound. They beat on the door, sure. Some even picked up rocks and empty bottles from the gutters and hurled them at the building. But no one screamed or shouted, lit anything on fire, or overturned any parked cars.
And they all had pasty white faces. Some had covered their complexions with pancake makeup, rouges, and lipstick like corpses made pretty for funerals. Most wore their Sunday best, marred with dirt.
Like corpses. And that’s when she finally accepted what her eyes were telling her. They looked like corpses because they were corpses.
Which meant she was insane.
Bible lessons at her father’s knee came back—that dead son of a bitch who hopefully would stay dead, although his hateful love would live forever. Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. Isaiah. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Thessalonians.
Was this the end of days? Had Christ at last descended with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God?
Paula hid behind a bush, at a loss what to d
o next.
A police cruiser was parked half in, half out of a garage adjoining the station. Its driver’s door hung open. Beside it lay a pile of viscera and torn clothing. Something within the clothing pile reflected the street lights still functioning, and she realized it was a badge.
Someone shouted inside the garage, “Get off me, you fucking hippies!” and followed it with a gun blast.
Another voice, also shouting, also panicked: “Not hippies, Chief! That’s too old-fashioned!” More gun blasts: boom, boom.
“Well, what do I call ’em? Greasers? Gangbangers?” Boom. “I can’t keep up with you fuckin’ youngsters!” Boom, boom.
“How about zombies?” Boom.
Doors slammed. An engine started. A second later, a police van roared out of the garage. The zombies—and they did call them zombies, Paula was sure of it—reacted too late. Two fell under it like wheat before a thresher and crunched under its tires.
Paula ran into the roadway and waved her arms. She hoped she didn’t look dead.
The van screeched to a stop a few feet away. The cop behind the wheel stared at her, openmouthed.
Behind them, the zombies lurched into a run to catch up.
The van’s sliding door flew open, and Chief Simpson leapt out. He fired his gun into the advancing horde. “Paula Trent! Get your ass in here!”
She didn’t need to be told twice.
***
Once in the van, the chief screamed, “Move!” at the driver. The young cop behind the wheel stomped the accelerator, throwing Paula and the chief onto their sides. Another cop in the back pushed the van’s sliding door shut.
Chief Simpson turned to her and managed a smile. “Paula Trent, as I live and breathe. You dressed for Halloween?”
It took her a moment to realize he referred to her negligee. Paula drew her robe around herself. “I…” She took a breath and decided it was stupid to be shy at this point, so she let the robe go. “My husband’s at Sammy’s Grocery. He’s late. I don’t know what happened to him.”
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 9
