by Brian Keene
Many summers ago, author Tim Lebbon was visiting me for a few days. One evening, we were sitting around my fire pit, smoking good cigars and drinking some fine scotch (a gift from author Sarah Langan) and our conversation turned to cats, and their habit of leaving dead things lying around, and how, quite often, it was only half of a dead thing.
There’s a certain look an author gets when a story idea suddenly hits him. Tim and I got the look at the same time. We both grew quiet, stared into the fire, and mulled our ideas over.
“I just got a killer story idea,” I said.
Tim nodded. “Me, too.”
I told him mine and he told me his. They were both good ideas. We agreed that, since it was my house and my cat, I should get to write the story, but that I should include Tim’s daughter, Ellie, in it, since she also had a cat. We finished our cigars and drank our scotch. The fire dwindled down to embers.
One year later, I wrote this tale. These days, Max is an indoor cat and occupies himself by chasing cat toys around my house.
The entity known as Mr. Chickbaum is also referenced in my novel A Gathering of Crows (but in a different form than a leprechaun). There’s a reason for this, which you’ll discover eventually. If I told you now, it would spoil the story to come...
WITHOUT YOU
I woke up this morning and shot myself twice.
Carolyn had already left for work. She’d tried waking me repeatedly, as she does every morning. It’s a game that has become an annoying ritual, much like the rest of my life.
The alarm went off for the first time at six. Like always, she was pressed up against me, and my morning hard on was wedged into her fat ass. She thinks that I still find her desirable, not realizing that every man in the world wakes up like that if he has a full bladder. Carolyn hasn’t turned me on in over ten years.
She lay there, as she does every morning, with the alarm blaring, snuggling tighter against me until I wanted to scream. Her breath stank. Her hair stank. She stank. I always shower before bed, as well as in the morning. She only showers in the morning.
I reached over her and hit the snooze button. Ten minutes later the scene replayed itself. This time she got up and stumbled off to the bathroom. Drifting in and out of sleep, I heard her singing along with Britney Spears on the radio. That’s something else that annoyed me. Here we were, both in our thirties, and she still insisted on listening to teenybopper pop music. I listened to talk radio mostly, but not Carolyn. She’d sing along with all that hip-hop shit.
It was enough to drive a man crazy.
After the shower, she walked into the bedroom, humming and dripping and babbling baby talk to me.
“Come on, my widdle poozie woozie, wakey wakey.”
I groaned, wanting to die right then and there.
“Did I tire you out last night,” she asked, as she ironed a skirt for work. “Am I too much for you?”
I mumbled an incoherent response, shuddering at thoughts of the previous evening’s acrobatics. She’d come three times. I had to envision my mother just to get it up, and still I had to fake an orgasm. Thank God for rubbers.
Twenty minutes later, I was still lying there and Carolyn was more insistent, warning me that I’d be late for work. I told her I was sick, and her smothering concern made me want to leap out of my skin. Thankfully, she’d been late for work, and I got off lucky with only a quick kiss and a promise to call me during her lunch break.
I heard the door shut. A minute later, I heard the Saturn cough to life. The Saturn that we still owed over six grand on, even though it was a piece of shit. The Saturn that we’d just had to have, because that’s what everybody else was driving. My S.U.V. had been bought for the same reason and we owed even more on it.
I rolled out of bed, walking through the house that we would be in debt for until our Sixties. I called into work, biting my lip to keep from arguing with Clarence when he questioned me. Twelve years I’d busted my ass for him. Twelve years of endless monotony, of heat and grime and boredom. Twelve years of ten-hour days with mandatory overtime, running a machine I was fated to operate until the soft haze of retirement. And after all of that, he had the fucking gall to suggest I was faking my illness?
My denial was short and terse. I hadn’t meant to call Clarence a fat bastard until it slipped through my clenched teeth.
After he fired me, I slammed the phone down into the cradle. Something warm dribbled down my chin. I tasted blood. I’d bitten through my lower lip. Wincing, I stumbled into the bathroom and watched the blood drip from my chin. One drop landed on my white undershirt. My stomach, bloated from too much cheap beer, seemed to take up most of my reflection. Two days worth of stubble covered my face. There were dark shadows under my eyes. Lines had formed in the past year.
I tore a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser and balled it against my lip. With my free hand, I fingered the growth on my face, trying to decide if it was worth my time to shave. Gray hair peppered my goatee.
The first tear took me by surprise.
I was thirty-five going on seventy. I owed a mountain of debt and had just lost my job. I was married to a woman who I hadn’t been in love with since shortly after high school. I had an ulcer, acid reflux, a receding hairline, and a bloody hole in my lip. My only friends were the other guys from work, and they were only my friends when I was buying the first round. I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and dipped half a can of Skoal. Even now, a tumor was probably spiraling its way through my body.
More tears followed. I collapsed next to the toilet bowl, sobbing. Where had it all gone wrong? Carolyn and I had been so happy during our senior year. I had a terrific arm in football and a promising scholarship. The world was mine and I was God. I used to tremble after our lovemaking, which is what it was back then, not the obscene pantomime it had become now. I had loved her so much.
“Do you love me,” she used to ask me afterward. “Do you really love me?”
I always replied, “I’d die without you.”
Then Carolyn got pregnant halfway through our senior year and I kissed college goodbye. The baby was stillborn. We never tried again. I guess that was when I began the downward spiral.
The phone rang. I rose unsteadily, leaning on the sink for support. My head throbbed. The phone rang again, more insistent this time. It reminded me of Carolyn.
I gripped the receiver so hard that my knuckles turned white. Probably Clarence, calling back to berate me some more.
“Hello?”
There was a pause and a series of mechanical clicks. Then a female spoke, offering me a free appraisal for storm windows on the home I couldn’t afford.
“I’m not interested,” I said. “Put us on your do not call list.”
“Can I axe you why, sir?” It sounded like she was reading from a script.
“You can’t ‘axe’ me anything. You can ‘ask’ me if you’d like, but the answer is still fuck off!”
The telemarketer launched into a tirade then and I ripped the phone from the wall. I flung it across the room. It smashed into a lamp that Carolyn’s mother had given to us for our fifth wedding anniversary. I stared at the fragments, felt fresh blood running down my chin again, and sighed.
I’d been contemplating it for weeks, but it wasn’t until then that I decided to die.
I went to the gun cabinet. Inside were my hunting rifles, kept for a pastime that I didn’t enjoy, but that I had to partake in to be considered a normal guy. My hand was steady as I unlocked the case and selected the 30.06 and a box of shells. The bullets slid into the chamber with satisfying clicks. I sat down on the bed with the gun between my legs.
I had seen pictures online of failed suicide attempts. Cases where the poor slob had placed the gun against the side of his head and pulled the trigger, writhing in agony when the bullet traveled around his brain and left him alive. That was no good. I needed to do this the right way. I placed the barrel in my mouth, tasting the oil on the cold metal. I breathed through my nos
e, deep-throating the gun the way I’d done my Uncle’s shriveled pecker when I was nine. As the barrel touched the back of my throat, I gagged, just like back then. Tears streamed down my face.
I glanced at the wedding picture on the nightstand. There was me and Carolyn. Two smiling people. Happy. In love. Not the balding loser who sat here now or the fat cow the woman had turned into.
The woman who I had promised to love forever so long ago.
“I’d die without you,” I mumbled around the barrel.
Then I pulled the trigger.
The initial force jerked me backward. The gun barrel impaled the roof of my mouth. I felt blast open my head and heard the wet slap of my brains hitting the wall, turning the ivory flowered wallpaper crimson. Grey chunks of brain matter and eggshell splinters of my fragmented skull embedded themselves in the drywall. My right eye dribbled down my face as my bladder and sphincter let loose, staining the bed sheets.
The pain stopped abruptly, as if someone had flicked a light switch. One moment I was writhing in agony and trying to scream around the gun. Then there was nothing.
But I was conscious.
I wasn’t dead. I’d fucked this up, too.
I pulled the trigger again. The second shot erased what was left of the top and back of my head. My face sagged down a few inches, making it hard to see clearly. Bits of skin and gristle dangled down my neck. The room stank of blood and shit and cordite.
The gunshots echoed throughout the house, drowning out my heavy breathing.
Letting the rifle slip from my numb fingers, I shuffled to the mirror and looked at the damage I’d inflicted. I had to shrug my shoulders a few times in order to get my face back up to eye level.
It wasn’t pretty.
I should have been dead, yet there I stood. I reached behind me, letting my fingers play across the gaping hole where my brain had been. There was nothing. No bald spot, no scalp, no skull. Nothing.
The phone rang again. It sounded muffled, thanks to my one remaining ear. After four rings, the answering machine clicked on.
“Hi, honey.” Carolyn. “I just wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“My headache is gone.” Laughing, I spat out a piece of myself. “I’ve cured the common headache.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “I’ve got to get back to work. See you when I get home. I love you.”
“I’d die without you.” My voice dripped with sarcasm.
Then it hit me—the reason that I was still alive.
So now I’m sitting here at the kitchen table, writing this while my insides dry on the bedroom wall. I’m almost free of this hell that is my life. Carolyn will be home soon, and I will fulfill the promise that I made to her so long ago.
STORY NOTE: This is another early tale. It suffers from that, at least by my reading, but I’ve always liked the opening sentence. Not much else to say about it, other than it was inspired by a late-night conversation with an old friend. I think of him whenever I re-read this.
COUCH POTATO
Adele didn’t know much about zombies until they interrupted the Jerry Springer show. It happened during an episode about—well, Adele wasn’t sure what it was about. She never paid that much attention to Jerry Springer. Her momma sure did, though. That was how Adele knew something was wrong. She’d been sitting on the floor, playing her four Disney princess dolls—Belle, Cinderella, Ariel, and Sleeping Beauty, all purchased for her by their neighbor, Mrs. Withers, at the Goodwill store (“and ain’t a one of them black”, the older woman had complained)—when the audience chants of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” were suddenly interrupted by a monotonous, urgent tone. Her mother groaned, muttered a curse, and reached for the remote control. Adele was quietly hopeful. Momma got upset when her TV viewing was inconvenienced, but it was also the only time she tended to pay any attention to Adele.
The droning alarm continued, and letters scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Adele read them as they flashed past. E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y... B-R-O-A-D-C-A-S-T... S-Y-S-T-E-M. She didn’t know quite what that meant, but it sounded scary, whatever it was. Still muttering, Momma pointed the remote at the television.
“Wait, Momma. Maybe it’s important.”
Her mother turned toward her. The gesture was slow and exaggerated, as if she’d forgotten that Adele was in the room and was surprised to hear her voice. She didn’t respond. Instead, she just stared at her daughter with a blank, indifferent expression, and then turned back to the screen.
Jerry Springer was gone now, replaced by the local news. The bar was still scrolling across the bottom of the screen, but the words were going by too fast for Adele to read them. Her mother began scrolling through the channels, but all of her favorite programs were gone, replaced instead by newscasters. Momma cursed. Adele listened.
And that was how she learned about zombies.
• • •
The people on television said it was a disease. Adele knew about diseases. Cancer, the thing that had taken her Grandma away last year, was a disease. So was Momma’s addiction to heroin, or at least, that’s what some people said. But she’d never heard of the disease that was turning people into zombies. It was called Hamelin’s Revenge. Adele hadn’t understood what the name meant. She heard a pretty newscaster say it had something to do with the story of the Pied Piper, but the only version of that story Adele was familiar with was from an old Looney Tunes cartoon that she’d seen on one of the rare occasions when her mother wasn’t watching television.
Apparently, the disease came from rats—dead rats, crawling out of the sewers and subways in New York City and attacking people. The people who were bitten got sick and died, and then they came back as zombies. And it wasn’t just people and rats, either. Dogs and cats could catch it, too. So could cows, bears, coyotes, goats, sheep, monkeys and other animals. A few animals, like pigs and birds, were immune, and for that, Adele was glad. There weren’t any pigs in Baltimore that she knew of, but she saw birds every time she went outside. She hated to think what would happen if they all turned into zombies.
All the shows that Momma liked—the court programs and soap operas and talk shows—were pre-empted by twenty-four hour news footage. She’d had no choice but to watch them, and as a result, Adele had watched them, too. Much of what she saw was confusing or scary, and in those first three days, it became a hodge-podge of horrific imagery. New York City was quarantined. National Guardsmen blockaded the bridges and tunnels and rail tracks, and fired on people trying to escape. Then the troops began fighting each other. The disease spread to other cities, and then to other countries. More and more people became zombies. The news said that all it took was one bite, one drop of blood, pus from an open sore or cut—any exposure to infected bodily fluid. People that died normal deaths stayed dead, but those who came into direct contact with the disease became zombies. A law was passed requiring the dead to be burned, and the television showed pictures of bulldozers pushing bodies into big, smoking pits. Chicago and Phoenix burned to the ground. Zombies overran an airport in Miami. A nuclear reactor melted down in China.
More and more people died every day, and then came back as zombies. There were also regular people—still living people—who were just as bad, if not worse, than the zombies. Adele knew all about bad people, of course. Her neighborhood was full of bad people (although there were some good ones, like Mrs. Withers next door, and her son Michael). But there were more bad people than good, and more zombies than either. The only thing that hadn’t changed was that the police still didn’t show up when people called for help. Now, the bad people finally had the opportunity to do everything they’d ever dreamed of.
Not so, Adele. Her dreams didn’t involve rape or murder or robbery. All she’d ever wanted was for her momma to pay attention to her. But that didn’t happen either. Not even when the power went on the third night. It was off for an hour before it came back on. Adele lay there in bed, hoping her mother would come in and check on her.
She didn
’t. Instead, Momma called the electric and cable companies to complain about the outage. Outside, the streets echoed with more gunshots and screams than usual. Adele fell asleep listening to Momma complain on the phone.
When she woke up the next morning, the power was back on again, but several stations had gone off the air.
• • •
Although Adele was only nine years old, she knew what a normal, loving family life was like. She’d seen plenty of examples on TV. She’d seen plenty of the other kind, as well. Often times, the people on the television used big words to refer to those bad relationships. One of the words was dysfunctional. Another was neglectful. In time, Adele came to understand that those words applied to her own home life, especially when compared against the lives of the kids on television. Those kids usually lived in nice houses, with one or two loving parents that took an interest in what they were doing, and talked to them, and played with them, and let them know that they were loved. Adele’s mother didn’t do those things. It wasn’t that Momma was abusive. She was just neglectful.
Before the zombies had come, Momma’s daily routine had been: wake up on the couch, fix, make coffee and light a cigarette, and then sit back down on the couch again. She’d sit there all day and watch television in between fixes. Occasionally, she’d make something to eat. Sometimes she’d even remember to make something for Adele to eat, as well, but Adele had become accustomed to making meals on her own. She liked school because she knew she’d get breakfast and lunch there. At home, she could never be sure. Adele put herself to bed most nights—bathed herself, put on her pajamas by herself, brushed her teeth, and read herself a bedtime story. She always told her momma good night. Occasionally, her mother would grunt in response. In rare moments, she might even spare a hug or a kiss on the cheek. But usually she just nodded, eyes glued to the television, cigarette smoldering between her fingers, discarded needle lying on the coffee table. Momma usually fell asleep on the couch at night. The television stayed on, even while they slept.
