“The doctor says it's advanced,” Lindsey said. “He hasn’t long to go.”
“Conlon needs to leave,” I said. “For his own good.”
“I was hoping that you’d be there before it comes to that,” my sister said slowly.
“That’s not what I meant.”
She looked at me for a second yet in that moment we exchanged a lifetime; Conlon’s disregard of the Hippocratic Oath on his road to become hypocrite incarnate. All the years of abuse selectively shelved in lofty positions, safe from prying eyes. And part of me knew that the doctor’s presence was an extension of the family need to keep the dirty linen in the basket for fear the stink brought too much attention, for fear that people would need to see exactly what kind of stain was soiling the air.
“Let’s go take a look at him,” I said heading for the stairs, which were in deep shadow.
“Maybe you should take this,” Lindsey said dragging the axe away from the cabinet. “You know, for later?”
“For the cake?" I said, my voice tight.
"Funny guy."
"Yeah,” I said without enthusiasm.
I took it from her without comment. It was heavy and the weightiness gave me assurance that it would do the job and save us all.
I mounted the stairs leaving Lindsey to stare after me, her bright blue eyes muted by the darkness. Ahead, a slab of light appeared; a door opening in the gloom. But not just any door.
His door.
The sanctum of Daddy Dearest, the place where he kept company with his new companion: The Sickness. In the doorway a figure wavered in the light. I held my breath, stopping my advance mid way on the stairs, my hands lifting the axe in a subconscious act of preparation. I sensed danger. But it was muted, as though drifting through a thick mist.
“Hope you’re not planning to use that on the living, John.”
Conlon’s tone was passive, but far from cordial. I lowered the axe, but only a little.
“I hadn’t intended to but who knows? It may give those not willing to take a hint a little incentive.”
Despite his age, Conlon was a big man. He had height, a good head and shoulders over me, and he had weight, his waist an inner tube of flesh that was barely contained by the belt of his pants. In the light of the doorway he stood a bloated bell shaped silhouette using the frame as support.
“Maybe we should accept that in this we’re on the same side?” he suggested.
“Just leave,” I said. “Then I’ll accept whatever you want.”
His shape sagged a little, his belly bouncing. “Maybe I should call the authorities?” he said softly. “Maybe I should let folk know that The Sickness is in town and it’s stopped to pay you guys a visit?”
“Maybe I take this axe to you and say it was a piece of mercy, that Daddy Dearest chowed down on your lard ass and you begged for someone to end it?”
It started out as a bluff, the ego rising from the ashes like a phoenix ready for magnificent rebirth. But as the words formed, becoming real in the gloomy stairwell, I considered it. And as fleeting as the thought was, it felt so right I became numb with shock that I even paid it any mind. I ushered the errant thought into a dark corner where it glowered, resentful and defiant.
“A boy left here,” Conlon said. “And a man has returned. Time works its magic doesn’t it?”
“Not on everything.”
“Happen that’s true,” the doctor said.
The silence rolled in the way a sea fog clogs the coastline in spring. I felt someone far away lower the axe, a sign that nothing changes. Not really. There’s no end to the war but there is always place for a cease fire. And that time was here, now, in the gloomy stairwell of a house choked with bad memories.
“You gonna help with this?” I said.
“Yes.”
“You know I hate you, right?”
“Yes,” the big man said. “The shine might come off of that hate once this is done.”
There was hope in his tone, absolution seeking out a chink in my armour. But why now? Years of regret perhaps? Years of guilt eating him away like a cancer?
“You coming to do this John? You coming to do the deed?”
Not Conlon this time. No resonance to the voice. Just a hiss, reed thin and gasping for air.
Daddy Dearest.
My skin crawled and my balls shrank. The hairs on my neck played host to goose flesh and the little boy who wet his pants when he heard the door click open at midnight, bringing Daddy Dearest and the stale sour odour of Ol’ Jack, screamed soundlessly in the locker chained shut at the back of my mind.
“Yes,” I said. But my voice was a small thing, lacking real conviction. “I’m coming to finish it.”
There were only seven steps separating the landing and me, yet there may as well have been ten storeys. My legs were uncooperative cylinders of leaden flesh, jittering with each footfall, and my heart was pumping way too fast.
My bravado had taken a vacation, gone off to console itself with false promises that it may return sometime soon with new vigour. I called out to it, but it was useless. The little boy was here, his bladder a ball of hot steel getting ready to flow.
“You need to hurry Johnny boy,” Daddy Dearest whispered. “My times almost up. And I don’t want to be coming back. Oh, my. No, I don’t, but I can feel the hunger, like a hard day on Ol' Jack, the need to feed.”
I was on the landing now, my feet shuffling across the heavy pile. The axe, now a sudden weight against my arm, trailed behind like a lame third leg, its steel heel bringing with it fibres and dust devils. My lungs were steel and my throat, fire. I fought to stay focused but the world wanted to flip, and send me screaming into a pit of fear.
Conlon watched my trial, his face a mixture of bemusement and remorse. In that moment, as I realised that perhaps bridges, whilst not returned to their former glory, may be patched up just enough to allow safe passage, a huge cry punched through the air. It was agony vented into the ether, agony coupled with anger that is born from the last vestiges of hope.
Daddy Dearest was dying. It was the sound that in another time, another place I would have celebrated. Hell, I’d have probably cranked up the dial and danced to its tune. But this wasn’t the dark corners I found when Ol’ Jack was hauling the shots. I was stone cold sober and Daddy Dearest was in the room barred only by a doctor stewing in the juices of guilt.
“Time to do the do, John,” Conlon said. “Then I’ll sign the certificate. And no one knows.”
“Your price for absolution?” I said.
“I already paid that this evenin’.”
He stepped aside and the light played on a large damp stain on the arm of his shirt sleeve. Blood. Soaking into the cotton fabric.
My face acted puzzled on behalf of a dawning mind and he nodded sadly.
“The hunger starts early.” His words explained more than just the chunk Daddy Dearest had relieved from the bad doctor’s arm. It also gave an answer to his sudden change of heart. The Sickness was in him. And soon he would follow Daddy Dearest into its endless world of hunger. The Dear Doctor needed out.
And he needed me to do it. I was taken aback that my earlier thoughts of murder would now come with sanction.
“I’ll help you to help me,” Conlon said, his smile slack and forlorn.
I never thought the time would come when such an enemy would become an ally. But that time had come knocking; dressed in its Sunday best.
I stepped into the room, where a small part of hell played out before me.
Daddy Dearest lay still upon his bed, the bedding a ruffled mess, streaked with blood. His limbs, twig thin and bare save for the crimson wheals cross-crossing his skin, jutted out from his pale blue pyjamas, toes and fingers clawed by the agony that had taken him to his momentary death. My eyes traced his gaunt stiffened outline until they alighted upon Daddy Dearest’s face, which was twisted into a mask of pain, mouth clamped in a crimson, oval grimace, cheeks sallow, and his eyes so wide they appe
ared to be without lids. I had seen those eyes many times, looked into them, and they were as terrifying in death as they were in life: piercing blue, devoid of expression or remorse, love or morality, rolling back into his head like a shark about to take a bite.
The blood on the sheets belonged to Conlon. I felt both disgusted and relieved by this knowledge. After all, it could so easily have been Lindsey with a chunk missing from her forearm.
“You’re going to have to do it soon. John,” Conlon said beside me, “I can support you through it. Then you know you’ll be able to do me.”
I know that now, I thought.
“Got to take his head clean off. No other medicine for The Sickness.”
“If you’re the expert, maybe you should do it?” I hissed.
“I can’t swing that axe hard enough,” Conlon said holding out his bloodied arm towards me, just in case I wasn’t getting the message. “No, John, this is your duty.”
I was about to respond, saying anything that would get the time passing without having to focus on what was unavoidable, but then I saw Daddy Dearest move. Only a finger at first, the one that used to have a wedding band as a sign of his eternal love for the mother I’d never known. It was a slight and deliberate movement, the clawed digit unfolding as though it were a flower seen through time lapse TV. The other fingers followed suit, accompanied by the protesting pop and snap of seized knuckles.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” Conlon whispered. “Ain’t that the damnedest thing?”
Damned alright. No doubts about that.
Even knowing it was coming to this made no odds to my ability to act swiftly. Last time I saw such a thing it was blunted by a TV screen. But up close and personal it was something else. It needed something to happen. It needed something from me.
“Do it, John!” No whisper from Conlon this time. Daddy Dearest was jerking into life like a mannequin bouncing down a stairway, arms and legs tight angles, C3PIO wearing a flesh suit.
I lifted the axe just as the first piteous moan wavered from Daddy Dearest’s throat. It was a sound at once woeful and deadly and turned my heart to ice.
“For Christ’s sake, do it!”
Another voice, loud and shrill: Lindsey’s voice from the doorway. I yanked my head towards her, caught the blend of shock and fear in her eyes. It held her gaze for a moment longer than I intended.
The next thing I knew, Conlon was screaming.
Daddy Dearest had hold of the doctor’s shirt, dragging the hem from out of his pants and exposing his big belly. Daddy’s reanimated corpse was using Conlon to haul itself up from the bed, dragging the bad, bad doctor forwards, towards its yawning mouth. Before I could take aim with the axe, Daddy Dearest was clamping down on Conlon’s flabby cheek and tearing him a new mouth.
I heard Conlon’s high pitched protest shortly before Daddy Dearest ripped the wad of flesh away with a sickening purring sound. Lindsey retched in the doorway.
“Get out of the way!” I yelled, stepping back so that I had room for a decent swing. But such instruction was fruitless, since the big man and Daddy Dearest were now intertwined. I clamped a hand over my mouth as daddy’s hands sought Conlon’s navel and the hooked fingers yanked open his abdomen, exposing a visceral kaleidoscope to the world.
Conlon wore a quasi-comical expression of disbelief and agony, his breath a prolonged hiss. His big frame flopped forwards, his ample innards slopping out onto the bed linen, and for a time the world stood still, punctuated by the greedy slurping of Daddy Dearest getting to know the doctor really well. Inside and out.
I fought to gain composure, barely able to stand. Daddy’s feeding had punctured something other than Conlon’s abdomen, and the room was beginning to fill with the reek of vomit and shit. I gagged but swallowed hard. I hefted the axe and stepped up to the bed where ol’ DD was buried up to his shoulders in the cavity he’d opened in the doctor’s belly.
“Heads up, you asshole!”
Daddy Dearest pulled his head out of Conlon with a sucking slurping sound. The ice blue eyes peered out from a crimson mask, and he was suddenly interested again. But by this time the axe was slicing through the air, and my arms prepared for steel to make contact, which it did seconds later, shearing one of his arms off at the elbow. Even for me, this was a spectacular miss.
“Shit!”
The arm struck the head board where it writhed like a mottled pink and red snake. Daddy Dearest pumped his blood onto the doctor, but neither was in any state to be concerned by it. Seemingly invigorated by his recent feed, daddy came at me, forcing himself upright, his remaining arm reaching out, his bloodied mouth hanging open.
Again I swung the axe, this time making contact with his forehead, but I was off balance and it was a glancing blow, knocking his head fiercely to one side, and lifting a piece of his scalp so that it waved in the air before slapping back into place like some macabre pedal bin. I tried to create more space, moving away from the bed towards the doorway, but Conlon’s legs got the better of me. I went down hard, going so far over on my right ankle that I heard the tendons shear shortly before the bolt of hot fire shot through my calf.
I cried out and clutched at my fractured ankle, the pain now the centre of my universe. And in the melee the axe went spinning away from me, skittering under a bed that was now seeping with gore, dulled only by the cloud of bright spots speckling my vision. And through this, the shape of Daddy Dearest emerged to say “hi” in the only way he knew how.
Through the pain I raised a hand to fend him off. It was feeble and resulted only in his teeth ripping off two fingers and a thumb. The pain in my ankle, the knuckle splitting agony flaring in my right hand, were nothing to the knowledge that even if I got out, even if I could do what I did so well and run away from the clutches of Daddy Dearest, The Sickness would soon be coming to pay me a visit. And all I could think of was Lindsey, standing in the doorway watching her world come apart, and making sure that she would be okay, making sure that she didn’t have to do the do.
Daddy Dearest was on top of me, possibly far stronger in death than he ever was in life. But I fought. Even with the severed fingers and the shattered ankle I fought, driving him off, shoving him so hard he pin-wheeled backwards and into the dressing table where his head struck the vanity mirror turning the glass into a tangled web of cracks. Then I was at the door, where Lindsey was wan with despair.
“Oh God, John. What do we do?”
I knocked her sideways onto the landing and reached for the key jutting out of the door. I’d yanked it out before Lindsey could realise my intention.
“Time for me to take care of Daddy Dearest, Linz,” I said as she scrambled back to her feet. “Time for you to get the hell away from here.”
I shut the door on her screams and jammed the key into the lock, turned it and yanked it to one side so that it snapped in the tumbler.
Heavy pounding on the door now as Lindsey called my name over and over, and Daddy Dearest climbed to his feet; his stump weeping, echoing the tears coursing down my cheeks. He stumbled over to me and I reached into my pockets, the Zippo and the hip flask becoming wet with my blood.
“Well how about it, Daddy?” I said hoarsely. “How about you an’ me share a little Ol’ Jack?”
Of course, Daddy Dearest was way past such things. His poison was very different these days. I sparked the Zippo, its flame a testament to the searing heat in both my hand and ankle. Daddy loomed, the hip flask blessed us both, splashes of alcohol maybe not enough to endure under the touch of flame, but enough to help it take hold, enough to send us both to the places we were destined to be.
Never to return.
Daddy lunged and I sparked him up. His nylon PJ’s roaring into a blistering heat, the burning material hanging like fireflies in the air before landing on the alcohol splashed about my own clothes. Even as the flames licked at my skin, I felt different, I felt The Sickness going to town on me. I rolled about the floor, ensuring the fire took hold of the room, of the house
. The world became a blinding place of fire heat and pain and I knew that of all the people in the house only one truly deserved to be free of it.
Lindsey.
My Lindsey.
Never ceasing to amaze.
THE END
HOME FOR THE ZOMBI-DAYS
By
A.P. Fuchs
There was no other tree like it.
Roy Davies swore up and down it had been reserved just for him. Or, at least, a guy like him full of Christmas cheer, blood pumping with hot cocoa, images of his family and their smiles dancing in his head.
Ol’ Sammy Dean said he had something special for him when Roy called in to Sam’s Treetop Top Trees Christmas Lot early that morning. The plan was to get a jump on all the other tree-buyers by hitting the place early, even wait outside the fence a few minutes before the lot opened with anyone else who was crazy enough to get there at 7am, and forfeit a Saturday’s sleep-in.
Except Roy didn’t count on Old Man Winter sending a dilly of a blizzard, covering the town of Dellisburg with two feet of snow. The white stuff came down in sheets for most of the morning, but the sky had cleared by early afternoon.
Roy’s truck wouldn’t budge out of the driveway, so he spent an hour shovelling to clear it up. Sure, after that the truck moved, but only got to the bottom of the driveway before hitting a snow ridge that it couldn’t clear.
Roy had no choice but to wait.
The afternoon wore on. He sat on a fold-out chair in the landing of his house, looking out the window of his screen door, waiting on the town to send a few street cleaners through.
Holiday of the Dead Page 31
