The Red King (Wyrd Book 1)

by Nick Cole

  Holiday was silent. Thinking about what’d she’d said. What he knew about himself. The days-long binges. Then, “I just like to have a good time.”

  “Me too.” Ash swam closer to him. Close. Very close now. “I like tequila. Had it once. Liked it a lot,” she said softly.

  Holiday wished he had some tequila back at the house.

  “You’ve only had it once?”

  She said “yes,” softly.

  Who’s seducing who, thought Holiday.

  “I’ll have to get some, sometime.”

  “You do that,” she said, her voice a throaty whisper, barely audible above the water in the pool gently slapping at the edges.

  “Hey, let me in!” Frank whispered loudly from the pool gate.

  They ate dinner, Frank talking, all of them eating Frank’s amazing Bolognese which was closer to a meat sauce than a true Bolognese. It was more tomato-y than creamy, which is what Frank was expounding upon. Over sips of Chianti, Ash and Holiday occasionally caught each other’s gaze and the slight smile they found on the face that went with it.

  “So Jimmy B,” continues Frank, “who’s this guy from the neighborhood, he tells me one night that his mama used to make the best Bolognese in the world. She was from the old country, Siena I think. And we were crazy back then. We’d be out at the clubs all night and we’d always get real hungry. There were a few diners y’know, that served some good chow. But if you really wanted to eat, you always went to someone’s mama’s house. There was always something there, no matter what time of night, for you to eat. So that night, I’d been singing at the Silver Spike down on Morgan Street and me and Jimmy B and a few of the show girls, we head back to Jimmy B’s mama’s house. Jimmy wakes her up, and thirty minutes later we’re eating the best Bolognese I’ve ever had. I had to have her secret recipe and I’ll tell it to you right now, ‘cause who’re you gonna tell? The secret was less milk and more fresh tomatoes at the end. Not even cooked. Just let the heat of the sauce and noodles cook them once you’re ready to plate. It really makes it much better, don’t you agree?”

  “I thought it was just spaghetti and meatballs,” said Ash. Frank roared with laughter, then remembered their surroundings. He continued to chuckle quietly. “Sweetheart, there’s places in this world, you could get killed for saying that.” Frank took a nice long drink of his Chianti. “But I forgive you, ‘cause you’re so pretty.”

  Holiday put down his fork, leaned back in his chair, one arm over the backrest, one leg tucked under the chair, the other kicked out in front of him. Frank remembered at that moment, seeing a sculpture once, in Italy, that looked just like that. Some young ruler, sitting on a throne. Some world conqueror, surveying his empire.

  “I think the part that fascinates me,” said Holiday taking a gulp from the glass dangling in his hand, “is that you said, am I correct here, that you ‘were singing’? At a place called the Silver Spike?”

  Frank looked down. Smiled to himself and then chuckled again.

  “I guess I haven’t told you what my day job is. Or rather, what my night job is. I’m a singer. I sing in piano bars and at a few occasions here and there around town. People today call it a lounge singer, like it means something different than what it used to. Like it’s a bad thing. But I don’t care. I just love to sing.”

  Silence.

  “Are you any good?” asked Holiday.

  “I made a record. Toured Europe back in the day. Had a few acts in Vegas.”

  “Wow,” said Ash into her glass of Chianti. “You were big time.”

  Frank smiled. Took a drink from his own glass. “Nah. I was never that. It was just a living.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was later, after they’d cleaned up the remains of dinner done to satisfying death, the pool shimmering, its light wavy beneath the water, a warm bright spot in the dark and uncertain night, when they headed back to their condos that Holiday casually asked Ash, “Wanna come over to my place and watch a movie? Get it while there’s still power.” He said it as though he was inviting everyone and all. In reality, all and everyone knew he meant Ash and Ash only.

  The awkwardness that followed ended badly when Ash declined. “I’d better turn in, otherwise I’ll drag tomorrow.” If she gave Holiday some kind of look in the darkness that said she really did want to go over to his place, then it remained in the darkness.

  “Goodnight, buddy,” said Frank as he and Ash walked off down the street, murmuring in the night underneath the streetlights.

  Holiday watched them go from his gate. He saw the lights come on in Frank’s townhome. A few minutes later, the lights went out and the night settled into its heavy quiet. Holiday went inside and thought about going to bed. That’s what I should do, he told himself. But he wasn’t tired yet.

  He got out the bottle with the eighth of vodka still sloshing around in it.

  It’s not enough, he heard his mind whisper.

  He put it back inside the cupboard, then sat in his big, comfy chair and smoked.

  He didn’t feel like watching a movie.

  He thought about Ash. Thought about how close they’d come in the pool. How almost perfect a moment that had been. Then Frank had shown up.

  It occurred to him that he could walk down the street and knock on her window. Or even throw a couple of pebbles at it.

  On the other hand, what if all the signals he thought she’d given him were just in his head? What if he’d assumed too much? What if?

  Then… he’d ruin everything. Forever. Ruin everything with what might be his only chance with the last girl left in the entire world.

  Still, the cigarette turning into a long ashy finger in the dark, he couldn’t turn off his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  He got up again, still holding the burning cigarette and flicked on the kitchen lights. He took out the vodka bottle.

  “I’ll just finish it, then head up to bed.” That’s what he told himself with a straight face. He even believed it in the moment before the bottle reached his lips.

  He held it and studied the plain label on the face of the bottle. As though some answer to all his questions could be found within its markings and symbols.

  He knew it wasn’t enough. The sloshy clear liquid fire that ran to one side of the bottle and then the other, made hollow notes as he turned the bottle this way and that. He knew what was in it wouldn’t be enough.

  “Don’t lie to yourself.”

  “And you know,” he heard the whisper whispering inside him. “You know where there’s more. All you want.”

  That’s insane.

  Is it?

  Yeah…

  You haven’t seen any more zombies, he reasoned. Since the other day.

  Zombies, really?

  Yeah. Those guys. There haven’t been any out there in the last few trips back and forth to Home Depot. Just that one yesterday near Del Taco.

  The one they’d told Frank about. The one they’d seen in the rearview mirror.

  Maybe they’re all downslope in Newport, ravaging the rich along the coast with nowhere to run unless you’re really, really good at swimming. A quick trip to the store and you’ve got all you can drink, Holiday.

  Is that really important, he asked himself. Right now. At this time. Is getting drunk important enough to risk your life?

  He unscrewed the top of the plain label bottle, and a second later felt its hot splash at the back of his mouth. He finished it and threw the bottle away on autopilot. Lighting another cigarette, he realized he was holding two and smoked the first one down, ashed it in the sink, ran some water, and put on his boots with the new cigarette between his lips.

  Just a quick trip, up and back. No one will even notice I’ve gone if I don’t take the car. I’ll just walk up there and get enough, more than enough and then I’ll have all I want. But, n
ot too much tonight. Lotsa work tomorrow, he told himself.

  He turned off the lights and stepped out into the quiet streets.

  Still no fog. If there had been, I wouldn’t have gone, so at least I have some kind of sense.

  He congratulated himself.

  At a quickish pace, he headed up past where the accident had been. They’d moved the orange metallic SUV and parked it in a nearby space. He followed the sidewalk, doglegging up and out of the complex. He came to the gate and dialed in the combination Frank had made them all memorize.

  He thought about relocking it, but, he reasoned, if he was being chased, he’d want it open so he could get through it quicker. So he left it unlocked. He passed the tall columns of ground-lit palm trees that stood guard at the entrance. There was no breeze, and the fronds sprung away motionless from the trunks high above.

  The quiet of the night felt almost suffocating and Holiday felt a strange giddiness well up within him. He felt alone and free now. The moon was high, it was warm and there wasn’t a living soul out there for miles.

  He thought of the undead, and he wasn’t as afraid of them as he knew he should have been. “I’m faster,” he said softly. If I need to get away, I’ll just run, and as long as I don’t get surprised I should be fine.

  At the intersection where the walker and the dog, or at least the remains thereof still waited in the night, he turned right and headed down the road, back to the stores and the center of Viejo Verde’s planned community of the future. He could smell the cloying gruesomeness of other dead bodies in a slight breeze drifting down the fire ravaged hill, and wondered when he’d ever smelled a dead body before. He couldn’t think of a memory in which he had. He approached sodium-lit islands of white hot streetlights, spaced at long intervals between the darkness along the road. The light felt as heavy as the depthless night it fought against. He followed the wide curving road that led into the Market Faire shopping center.

  Above him, the charred-bone remains of the development that had burned to the ground watched him from the hill above. Those once-mansions in Viejo Verde. Gone now.

  Holiday walked slowly, watching the shadows at the sides of the road. Watching the bushy landscaping and the dark places where the light didn’t reach. Ahead he could see the bright insides of the Market Faire.

  “Any trouble and I’ll just take off,” he told himself. “I’ll go back to my place and go to sleep.”

  He walked in the center of the southbound lanes, keeping a good distance between himself and the landscaped median that separated the two directions of the roadway.

  He passed another intersection where a darkened gas station and car wash hunkered down on the southwest corner. The strip malls on both sides of the road started another block up, and while some stores seemed ready for business, their lights proclaiming them in the night, other businesses were dark. In some, windows had even been smashed. He passed a darkened McDonald’s that looked out into a parking lot fronting a large chain drugstore. Burning white fluorescent lamps threw cones of illumination across the gigantic parking lot there, creating tall teepees of light.

  He saw one of them. A zombie.

  It was standing under a light in the parking lot, looking up at nothing. Maybe the light itself. The falling photons, the entrancing buzz that hummed from above. It had been a young man, once. Long shorts. Oversized t-shirt. Shaved head. No obvious injury from this distance. Swaying slightly now.

  Holiday crouched low and continued up the road past it. Ahead, he could hear the dull hum of more of the powerful parking lot lights harmonizing in some weird end of the world night chorus.

  Maybe that’s what’s got his attention, he reasoned. The humming lights.

  Holiday crossed the road and walked into the parking lot of a wilderness park. He crossed the common greens under young well-pruned spruces that threw their shadows across the grass and gray sidewalk. On the other side of the greenbelt lay the Market Faire and the strip mall parking lot.

  A question occurred to Holiday. It was startling and clear in the silence made by no other living thing for miles. How was he going to get everything home, because he was planning on getting a lot?

  Enough for awhile.

  Then…

  Is enough ever enough?

  “Maybe I’ll just take a shopping cart,” he mumbled to himself.

  He watched the parking lot. Nothing. No one moved. No things moved. The store was still brightly lit. Just as it had been in the daytime.

  When you go in, check the entire store first. Check everything before you grab a beer from the cooler. Sound advice, he told himself. Have a plan.

  He crossed into the parking lot and made his way up to the front doors of the store which opened for him automatically.

  It wasn’t Aerosmith this time. Some band from the eighties. A band that people had thought, at the time, played punk rock. Until they’d actually heard real punk rock. Girl singer. Holiday didn’t know the tune very well.

  He went to the beer cooler and grabbed a Sapporo. He popped it and took a thirsty drink, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He put the cold beer on his forehead. He was sweating. He’d been tense.

  Well, it was a little freaky out there, he reasoned. He finished the beer, grabbed another, then remembered to check the store first. That had been the plan he’d made as he walked through the suffocating darkness between home and here.

  A new song started.

  Dave Mathews. Crash into Me. He walked along the main aisle between the cash registers and the rows of shelving. He could hear the soft thump of his boots on the glossy floor. The aisles were devoid of bodies living, undead and finally dead. He definitely wasn’t going back into the storage rooms or the warehouse or whatever was in the back of the store. And he was most definitely not going to check out the meat locker. On the other side of the store, he found some lawn furniture on sale at the end of summer. He sat down, it wasn’t comfortable.

  Probably why it’s on sale, he told himself. Still, it kind of rocked back and forth. It had a nice bounce in it. He rocked and finished the Sapporo, listening to Dave Mathews and thinking of Ash.

  She was really beautiful.

  And…

  There was more to her than just that. She was good. She was the kind of person you could tell that about without her saying a word. “Yeah,” he said out loud, sipping his beer, “sure she has secrets. Birds fly, women have secrets.” It would be odd if she didn’t have any. That would be cause for suspicion. But lately, more and more, the women he met didn’t always have secrets. Or at least it didn’t seem that way. There were no secrets anymore. Everything was blunt, brazen, open. Out there. And if you didn’t like it, you could just go to hell.

  He remembered thinking, a long time ago, that women had secrets. And that… he liked that about them when he passed them in the bazaar. He’d liked puzzles. Mysteries. Women.

  But when he forced himself to think of an example of a woman he could name recently who had been mysterious, he couldn’t think of one.

  “Your mother was,” he heard himself say.

  He finished the beer and flung it behind a deli case.

  The sliced deli meats and potato salads already weren’t looking too good. He walked over to the shopping carts at the front of the store and got one.

  Your mother is the ultimate mysterious woman, he told himself. The woman of secrets. Maybe, that’s why you like secrets.

  Makes sense, he thought, and put a bunch of six packs of Sapporos in the cart. There weren’t any cases.

  He pushed the cart over to the liquor aisle.

  Be careful here, he heard himself say. You could hurt yourself here.

  He picked up three bottles of Maker’s Mark Bourbon, a whiskey called Clevinger’s, and some port that he had to pry open the fancy and very expensive liquors locked glass cabinet for. He broke the
glass as he did. He told himself the port was a gift for Frank.

  It’s not as much as I could take. I could take more, he told himself. So in a sense, I’m being responsible.

  In a sense. He laughed at that. At himself.

  He pushed the cart back over to the lawn furniture and took out a pack of cigarettes from a carton he’d liberated from the cigarette case. He sat down, thought about a beer, but instead peeled off the wax seal protecting the Maker’s Mark.

  He sat back in the lawn chair and listened to the music coming over the PA system. Maybe it was the last music the world would ever record. He drank.

  He was thinking about Ash, about her moving in with him. Him quitting drinking. Them building a life together. Whatever the world was going through… they could… they could make it together.

  He jerked suddenly and realized he’d been asleep.

  He heard the automatic door at the front of the store slide open. He heard the sudden void in sound reflection as Sugar Ray sang about something or other, the voice and horns and drums escaping into the night silence outside… or maybe… as the silent night rushed in.

  Holiday had a sudden fear that the fog was back. That it was creeping into the store and had somehow triggered the sliding automatic door. That it knew he was in here and it was coming for him.

  Then he heard the soft thump and drag of a foot followed by a low, papery groan. He saw an old man, wrinkled, shriveled, thin and bloody, make his way past the floral arrangements and into the main aisle of the store. He watched the thing… the once-old man… the zombie drag-thump its way across the main aisle and then disappear into an aisle farther down.

  Time to go, thought Holiday.

  He checked his cell phone for the time. The no service message still blinked back at him. It was 1:27 am.

  Crud, he thought.

  He capped the Maker’s Mark, put it back into the shopping cart with all his other swag, and slowly pushed the cart toward the front entrance.

  One of the wheels squeaked louder than he remembered it had.