Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  Not another soul in sight. Just Tess and me kneeling in the sand. Staring down the beach at another dark figure lying still as driftwood far above the tideline.

  Tess got to her feet.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “You sure?” I said. “Maybe we should just find a phone. Call the police.”

  She stopped and turned and seemed to consider this and somehow I thought she was studying me too. Both at the same time.

  “He could be hurt or something,” she said. “You can’t just leave him. We have to see.”

  I knew I didn’t want to see.

  But she had a point. I went along.

  The man was lying flat on his back and one of his legs was curled under him, the opposite arm flung high. Like he was running, waving to somebody except he was lying in the sand and he wasn’t going to be doing any running or waving any more. It had been a shotgun, all right. Beneath the outflung arm there was a chunk of him missing as big as a baseball. The chunk was nowhere around that I could see. But the sand was dark all down under his chest and his chest was glistening bright in the moonlight.

  Mid-thirties, I thought. Slim and dark and well-muscled. Wearing jeans and a Dallas teeshirt. One eye open wide, the other half shut. Jaw dropped and mouth open. The sand-crabs would love him.

  Crawl in, crawl out.

  I felt my stomach roll and tasted acid.

  “Well, it’s not Elvis,” she said, her voice soft and low. It took me a second to realize she was remembering that dumb-ass line of mine in the bar. “This guy couldn’t even carry a tune.”

  And that took a second to sink in too.

  “Jesus, Tess. You know this guy?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I do.”

  I waited for her to explain. She didn’t explain.

  But I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “I think we’d better find a phone,” she said and turned and started walking.

  “Wait a minute. Who is the guy?”

  “Look, right now we need a phone. Later, okay?”

  She was trudging across the sand, headed for a ramp. Not the ramp the man had used but one further on down the beach.

  We hit the broad concrete walkway and I could see a lighted phone booth a few blocks away in front of a closed dark arcade. I was aware of the sea-smell of the beach and the lonely sound of our shoes against the concrete.

  She got in the booth. Dialed 911.

  “There’s a man on the beach. He’s dead,” she said. “Across from Franklin Street. We found him. My boyfriend and I. We saw a man with a shotgun. He was running away and then he got into a car. We didn’t see the car. You’ll find one set of footprints leading up to one of the ramps and two sets leading up to another.” There was a pause. “No, of course not. Why would you need our names. That’s all we saw. Goodbye.”

  I thought, boyfriend. I’d arrived there fast. I wasn’t sure to be pleased or worried about it. I was leaving around noon today, about nine hours away. I wouldn’t be back for over a month. If at all. I hardly knew her and I wasn’t sure what it was she expecting.

  She stepped out of the phone booth and took me by the arm and pushed me back into the shadows of the arcade and kissed me. I wasn’t prepared for the kiss and certainly not for its ferocity. I returned it, though. Willingly.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “What if he comes back? Could you take me home? To your friends’ house, maybe?”

  Her eyes glittered, reflecting back the moon. The only light in that dark place.

  “Sure,” I told her.

  On the way back to Queen Street I didn’t push her about the guy. I figured, let her open up to me in her own good time.

  The walk didn’t take long. We met no one along the way.

  When we were nearly there she said, “his name was Tommy Brookwalter. He was a year behind me in high school. I knew him a little then but you know, a year’s forever when you’re in high school. Then he moved to Boston while I was working on my Masters. He looked me up and we had a thing for a while. It didn’t work out.”

  I put my arm around her. She sounded sad and I knew she’d cared for him. And then we were home.

  We poured some drinks downstairs and crept quietly up to my room so as not to wake Liam and Kate—and that was the second pair of drinks we never got round to drinking that night because as soon as we sat down on the bed we were both all mouths and hands, we were suddenly nothing but flesh, trying against flesh to stifle the moans, the hisses and gasps of pain that came of the sheer steady violence of it, her fingernails gouging my back urging me to violence of my own, sex like the pounding weight of surf strong enough to break the shell and polish the stone, the two of us like a pair of sin-eaters devouring the crimes and guilts of the dead and of our own.

  We had all that. And then we rested.

  And then we had it all once again.

  In the morning she was gone. Of course she was.

  It was the cops who awakened me, talking downstairs to Liam and Kate.

  Two ordinary-looking men in shirtsleeves and ties. She had given them this address and she had given them my name.

  They wanted to establish that I was with her. All night. I said I was. I told them it was the two of us who had heard the shot and seen the body and that of course it was Tess who called it in. But I was curious. How had they arrived at Tess as being the woman on the phone? They said they hadn’t. That Tess had just admitted it to them an hour ago when they questioned her.

  I didn’t understand.

  The cop I was talking to sighed and told me that Tommy Brookwalter was pretty much the reason Tess was back in town in the first place. That they’d been all set to open up a business together, a restaurant and raw bar coupled with a fish store that would contract directly to local fishermen and wind up selling the best damn seafood in town. They knew Cape May and they knew there was room for a place like that. Meanwhile they’d been engaged to marry. Until Brookwalter took up with another woman. And not long after that Tess got the boot. The woman was now his wife and the restaurant belonged to them and Tess was out of the picture completely and working for her parents at their little Bed & Breakfast.

  It was common knowledge that Tess had taken all this badly. She drank. And when she drank she talked.

  Not to me, though.

  She hadn’t talked to me.

  I was trying to take this in. I asked them if that meant she was a suspect, if they were saying they thought she’d arranged it somehow.

  Not at this time, they said. Right now they were only asking questions.

  And I was her alibi.

  A pretty damn good one at that.

  I got the train back to Manhattan. I stood in the cool misty rain at Penn Station wondering which was likely to be more dangerous—going back there and calling as I’d promised her I would or never going back there again and never ever calling her at all.

  The answer would have been obvious. Except for the last thing she’d said to me.

  The last thing she said before I fell asleep.

  Well, she’d sung it, actually.

  And me, I’d smiled.

  You’re caught in a trap. You can’t walk out. Because I love you too much, baby.

  I thought she had a really good voice. A nice husky alto.

  It didn’t surprise me.

  The Visitor

  For Neal McPheeters

  The old woman in bed number 418B of Dexter Memorial was not his wife. There was a strong resemblance though. Bea had died early on.

  He had not been breathing well that night, the night the dead started walking, so they had gone to bed early without watching the news though they hated the news and probably would have chosen to miss it anyway. Nor had they awakened to anything alarming during the night. He still wasn’t breathing well or feeling much better the following morning when John Blount climbed the stairs to the front door of their mobile home unit to visit over a cup of coffee as was his custom three or four days a week
and bit Beatrice on the collarbone, which was not his custom at all.

  Breathing well or not Will pried him off her and pushed him back down the stairs through the open door. John was no spring chicken either and the fall spread his brains out all across their driveway.

  Will bundled Beatrice into the car and headed for the hospital half a mile away. And that was where he learned that all across Florida—all over the country and perhaps the world—the dead were rising. He learned by asking questions of the harried hospital personnel, the doctors and nurses who admitted her. Bea was hysterical having been bitten by a friend and fellow golfer so they sedated her and consequently it was doubtful that she ever learned the dead were doing anything at all. Which was probably just as well. Her brother and sister were buried over at Stoneyview Cemetery just six blocks away and the thought of them walking the streets of Punta Gorda again biting people would have upset her.

  He saw some terrible things that first day.

  He saw a man with his nose bitten off—the nosebleed to end all nosebleeds—and a woman wheeled in on a gurney whose breasts had been gnawed away. He saw a black girl not more than six who had lost an arm. Saw the dead and mutilated body of an infant child sit up and scream.

  The sedation wore off. But Bea continued sleeping.

  It was a troubled, painful sleep. They gave her painkillers through the IV and tied her arms and legs to the bed. The doctors said there was a kind of poison in her. They did not know how long it would take to kill her. It varied.

  Each day he would arrive at the hospital to the sounds of sirens and gunfire outside and each night he would leave to the same. Inside it was relatively quiet unless one of them awoke and that only lasted a little while until they administered the lethal injection. Then it was quiet again and he could talk to her.

  He would tell her stories she had heard many times but which he knew she would not mind his telling again. About his mother sending him out with a nickel to buy blocks of ice from the iceman on Stuyvesant Avenue. About playing pool with Jackie Gleason in a down-neck Newark pool hall just before the war and almost beating him. About the time he was out with his first-wife-to-be and his father-in-law-to-be sitting in a bar together and somebody insulted her and he took a swing at the guy but the guy had ducked and he pasted his future father-in-law instead.

  He would urge her not to die. To try to come back to him.

  He would ask her to remember their wedding day and how their friends were there and how the sun was shining.

  He brought flowers until he could no longer stand the scent of them. He bought mylar balloons from the gift shop that said get well get well soon and tied them to the same bed she was tied to.

  Days passed with a numbing regularity. He saw many more horrible things. He knew that she was lingering far longer than most did. The hospital guards all knew him at the door by now and did not even bother to ask him for a pass anymore.

  “Four eighteen B,” he would say but probably even that wasn’t necessary.

  Nights he’d go home to a boarded-up mobile home in an increasingly deserted Village, put a frozen dinner into the microwave and watch the evening news—it was all news now, ever since the dead started rising—and when it was over he’d go to bed. No friends came by. Many of his friends were themselves dead. He didn’t encourage the living.

  Then one morning she was gone.

  Every trace of her.

  The flowers were gone, the balloons, her clothing—everything. The doctors told him that she had died during the night but that as of course he must have noticed by now, they had this down pretty much to a science and a humane one at that, that once she’d come back again it had been very quick and she hadn’t suffered.

  If he wanted he could sit there for a while, the doctor said. Or there was a grief counselor who could certainly be made available to him.

  He sat.

  In an hour they wheeled in a pasty-faced redhead perhaps ten years younger than Will with what was obviously a nasty bite out of her left cheek just above the lip. A kiss, perhaps, gone awry. The nurses did not seem to notice him there. Or if they did they ignored him. He sat and watched the redhead sleep in his dead wife’s bed.

  In the morning he came by to visit.

  He told the guard four eighteen B.

  He sat in the chair and told her the story about playing pool with Gleason, how he’d sunk his goddamn cue ball going after the eight, and about buying rotten hamburger during the Great Depression and his first wife crying well into the night over a pound of spoiled meat. He told her the old joke about the rooster in the hen yard. He spoke softly about friends and relations, long dead. He went down to the gift shop and bought her a card and a small potted plant for the window next to the bed.

  Two days later she was gone. The card and potted plant were gone too and her drawer and closet were empty.

  The man who lay there in her bed was about Will’s age and roughly the same height and build and he had lost an eye and an ear along with his thumb, index and middle fingers of his hand, all on the right side of his body. He had a habit of lying slightly to his left as though to turn away from what the dead had done to him.

  Something about the man made Will think he was a sailor, some rough weathered texture to his face or perhaps the fierce bushy eyebrows and the grizzled white stubble of beard. Will had never sailed himself but he had always wanted to. He told the man about his summers as a boy at Asbury Park and Point Pleasant down at the Jersey shore, nights on the boardwalk and days with his family by the sea. It was the closest thing he could think of that the man might possibly relate to.

  The man lasted just a single night.

  Two more came and went—a middle-aged woman and a pretty teenage girl.

  He did not know what to say to the girl. It had been years since he had even spoken to a person who was still in her teens—unless you could count the cashiers at the market. So he sat and hummed to himself and read to her out of a four-month-old copy of People magazine.

  He bought her daisies and a small stuffed teddy bear and placed the bear next to her on the bed.

  The girl was the first to die and then come back in his presence.

  He was surprised that it startled him so little. One moment the girl was sleeping and the next she was struggling against the straps which bound her to the bed, the thick grey-yellow mucus flowing from her mouth and nose spraying the sheets they had wrapped around her tight. There was a sound in her throat like the burning of dry leaves.

  Will pushed his chair back toward the wall and watched her. He had the feeling there was nothing he could say to her.

  On the wall above a small red monitor light was blinking on and off. Presumably a similar light was blinking at the nurses’ station because within seconds a nurse, a doctor and a male attendant were all in the room and the attendant was holding her head while the doctor administered the injection through her nostril far up into the brain. The girl shuddered once and then seemed to wilt and slide deep down into the bed. The stuffed bear tumbled to the floor.

  The doctor turned to Will.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That you had to see this.”

  Will nodded. The doctor took him for a relative.

  Will didn’t mind.

  They pulled the sheet up over her and glanced at him a moment longer and then walked out through the doorway.

  He got up and followed. He took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked past the guard to the parking lot. He could hear automatic weapons-fire from the WalMart down the block. He got into his car and drove home.

  After dinner he had trouble breathing so he took a little oxygen and went to bed early. He felt a lot better in the morning.

  Two more died. Both of them at night. Passed like ghosts from his life.

  The second to die in front of him was a hospital attendant. Will had seen him many times. A young fellow, slightly balding. Evidently he’d been bitten while a doctor administered the usual injection becaus
e the webbing of his hand was bandaged and suppurating slightly.

  The attendant did not go easily. He was a young man with a thick muscular neck and he thrashed and shook the bed.

  The third to die in front of him was the woman who looked so much like Bea. Who had her hair and eyes and general build and coloring.

  He watched them put her down and thought, this was what it was like. Her face would have looked this way. Her body would have done that.

  On the morning after she died and rose and died again he was walking past the first-floor guard, a soft little heavy-set man who had known him by sight for what must have been a while now. “Four eighteen B,” he said.