“I don’t know that either,” Kara sighed. She also didn’t know how to get out of this predicament. Not without killing the man anyway. “Alice, do you know what death is?”
“It’s when something’s soul goes to heaven and they don’t come back to their body,” Alice explained.
“That’s right.” Kara didn’t correct her about there being a hell too. “Do you know what a cadaver is?”
“Shoes finds them.” Alice looked at the dog with a happy smile.
“Yes, but do you know what they are?” Kara pressed.
“I think they’re people that got lost and then died,” Alice said very solemnly. “Shoes would find them so that people would know what happened.”
“Well Shoes seems to think that this man is a cadaver.” Kara still found that odd, but she was going to use it to make herself not look like a villain for what she was about to do.
“He doesn’t look dead,” Alice frowned.
“Maybe his soul tried to leave but got stuck. Maybe only the bad part stayed behind.”
Alice scrutinized the man. “Could be,” she nodded as if this was very logical. “What do we do? We can’t get his soul back. Daddy told me when my mommy died that you can’t get souls back.”
Kara’s heart squeezed ever so slightly. She herself had lost her mother when she was a young girl. Not as young as Alice though. “And he was right, you can’t bring them back. I think what we need to do is get the rest of the soul out of him.”
“You mean kill him?” Alice’s eyes went very wide. Her voice then dropped to a mere whisper. “But that’s bad. That’s the very worst.”
“I know, it’s a sin,” Kara nodded. “But this man’s soul has been split in two, and that also seems like a very bad thing to me.”
Alice’s face scrunched up in thought.
“And he’s trying to hurt us,” Kara reminded her. “I was taught that the only time you can do something bad, is if you’re trying to protect yourself from someone hurting you.”
“Like why Daddy carries a gun to work.”
“Just like that.”
“Okay.” Alice turned to the man in coveralls. “I’m sorry we have to do this,” she said sincerely. “But it is for the best. You’ll like heaven. I was told it’s a very nice place. I hope you’re happy again when your soul is put back together.”
When Alice smiled up at Kara, Kara smiled back. “Very nicely said. Now I don’t think you should see this. Go into the corner over there and cover your ears, all right? Maybe you could sing a song.”
“Okay.” Alice headed for the corner. “Come on Shoes.” The dog trotted after her and sat at her side.
Once Alice had covered her ears and starting singing the alphabet, Kara turned back to the man at the cage. She flexed her injured hand a few times. She was going to have to do this with just her right hand. The next few moments were a blur of red blood and green glass.
* * *
Kara stood over the man, looking down at his body. It had finally stopped moving when his forehead had become a crater filled with blood. The end of the bottle had a large patch of blood and hair sticking to it, but it somehow managed not to break during the ordeal. The wine may be cheap, but the bottle was good quality. She placed it on the ground next to the corpse. A low woof behind her startled Kara. Shoes appeared next to her, looking at her and wagging his tail. Did he know what Kara had done and approved? Of course not, he was just a dumb dog. She stood back up.
Alice was still sitting in the corner with her hands over her ears. She was humming something but Kara couldn’t tell what over the sound of the alarm still blaring upstairs.
“Alice?” Kara took a few steps toward her. “It’s over.”
Alice turned her head and looked up at her. Her large blue eyes were glassy with tears but they didn’t spill over. She carefully got to her feet and walked over to Kara. She placed her small hand in hers, then placed the other over her eyes.
“I don’t want to see him,” she explained.
“You don’t have to.” Kara scooped Alice up and carried her over to the cage door. Even though she hadn’t been thinking at the time and was acting on pure instinct, Kara was damned glad she had remembered to bring the key to the door with her. The door swung outward though and to open it Kara had to shove it into the body and push hard. Shoes woofed when she did this.
“Quiet, Shoes,” Alice scolded the dog from her perch, still covering her eyes. “We know he’s there. He’s not lost anymore.”
Kara headed through the broken doorway and back toward the stairs. The dog followed along after her, its leash dragging behind it. Once they reached the stairs, out of sight of the body, Kara sat Alice down upon them. She noticed the dog’s leash had dragged through the blood so she distastefully unclipped it and tossed it across the room. There was nothing she could do about his bloody paws though.
“Will he follow us without his leash?” Kara turned to Alice and saw that she was still covering her eyes. “You can look now.”
Alice removed her hands. “Shoes is a good dog. We only put the leash on him because it’s the law.”
“Well, just like the dog poop thing, he doesn’t need a leash today either.” Kara found no harm in lying some more. This was the most she had ever lied to a child. “It’s like a doggy freedom day.”
“Shoes is free,” Alice frowned, confused.
Kara just smiled and started up the stairs. “Come along now.”
Alice followed her.
Upstairs, the alarm continued to call out. It was headache inducing. No cops or security showed up though. Kara went to the front door first. The other man in the overalls, the one who had attacked Walter, was standing right outside it, pounding his fists against it. She looked through a window and saw another person in torn clothing climbing over the front wall. Kara took Alice’s hand and led her to the back of the house. She was very glad to exit that building. The alarm was going to drive her mad if she had to spend a minute more listening to it. She hurried over to the wall to the next house and boosted Alice up to the top of it. The girl was small enough to sit straddling the top.
“Can you hold him?” Kara started to lift Shoes up whether Alice said she could or not. Kara didn’t really like the dog, but she thought his nose would come in handy. Alice reached down and grabbed the dog by his collar. She pulled him up, nearly causing herself to topple over, and placed him across her lap. The dog stayed very still, perhaps sensing its precarious perch. Or perhaps it was just lazy and liked being draped across the girl’s lap.
Kara hopped and grabbed the top of the wall. Once again, she was glad she wore her sensible walking shoes today as opposed to her heels. She pulled herself up onto the wall and swung her legs over it. As she began to drop down, she noted some movement out of the corner of her eye. Further along the wall was one of her neighbours trying to climb it the other way. Kara briefly thought about calling to her, but then she noticed how fervently she was clawing at the wall. She was one of them, the ones with the broken souls. She didn’t seem to notice Kara though; she was solely focused on the wall in front of her.
Kara turned back to face Alice and held out her arms. Alice shoved the dog with his loose skin into them. Kara quickly plunked him down on the ground and held out her arms again for Alice. She put Alice on the ground more carefully than Shoes. The two of them, plus the dog, hurried across the back lawn. The next wall was just like the last. Kara turned to pick up Alice again when the little girl suddenly pointed past her.
“Mister Walter!” she cried with delight.
Kara turned to find Walter coming toward them. He was mussed up and his shoulder was bleeding, but otherwise, he looked all right.
“Walter?” Kara took a step towards him but was still being cautious.
“I’m all right.” Walter held up a hand. “That guy bit into my shoulder but when that house alarm went off, he ran toward it. I’m glad to see you’re both all right. Here.” Walter held out Kara’s cane. “
I found this on the front lawn. I guess you dropped it.”
“Thank you, Walter,” Kara allowed a little bit of emotion into her voice. She was glad to see Walter and to hear he was all right. “Do you need anything for your shoulder?”
“I’ll probably need to use some rubbing alcohol or something on it, but it’s not that deep.” Walter showed her the wound. He was right, it wasn’t very deep. The perfect teeth impressions though were disturbing.
“Mister Walter, we had to help a man whose soul was torn in two!” Alice crowed.
Walter gave Kara a quizzical look.
“I’ll tell you later,” she sighed. “Let’s just keep going to the house.”
“Shoes was a very good dog,” Alice told Walter as Kara helped her up onto the wall.
“Was he now?” Walter humoured her. Despite his wounded shoulder, he got up the wall easily. He was probably running on adrenaline and not really feeling the pain, just like Kara was doing with her hand. The feeling was most likely new to him though. With Kara, adrenaline kicks were almost an old friend, the kind where you were unsure if you’d enjoy their visit.
Kara scooped up the pooch and tossed it over the wall. It let out a yelp when she first tossed it, but didn’t make a sound on the other side. Walter must have caught it successfully despite having no warning. Alice frowned at her though. She did not approve of scaring her ‘puppy.’ As Kara climbed up, Alice hopped down the other side.
The next yard had a pool and Shoes wandered over to it. He stood on the shallowest step and drank the water around him. Kara sighed because he would now probably have a wet dog odour. On the plus side though, his feet were being cleaned. Walter knelt next to the pool and splashed a bit of water onto his shoulder, washing the wound. Kara thought about cleaning her hand, but something inside her told her to wait. She trusted her instincts; they were her gift from a God that wasn’t watching. When Alice knelt beside the pool and bent down as if to take a drink, Kara hurried over and stopped her.
“You shouldn’t drink that,” Kara told her.
“Why not? Shoes is,” Alice objected.
“Well there are things that are okay for dogs, but not for people.” Kara didn’t think that pool water applied but still, she’d rather not have the girl drink it.
“She’s right,” Walter backed her up. “Pool water has a chemical in it that can be bad for you if you drink it. Shoes will be all right though.”
Alice looked from Walter to Kara and back to Walter. She sighed and got back onto her feet accepting their combined knowledge. “Come, Shoes!”
The dog hopped out of the pool and trotted over, his saggy skin wobbling from side to side. Alice looked down at her dog while it looked back up at her. There was definitely some sort of connection between the two that Kara couldn’t grasp. She thought that might have been because she had never had a real pet growing up.
They continued through several more backyards, the fences getting higher and harder to scale each time. Eventually, they came to one that was much too high to reach and had small metal points at the top.
“This wall seemed like such a good idea at the time,” Kara sighed. On the other side of the wall was her own home.
“It still is good,” Walter commented. “It should keep others out. The problem is that we need to be on the other side for it to be useful.”
“I’m tired,” Alice huffed.
“We’re almost there,” Walter offered her a smile.
She didn’t smile back. “My feet hurt.”
“Maybe it’s safe enough to go around the front.” Kara started leading the way toward the front yard. There was nothing separating the front and back yards along the side of the house making it an easy walk to get there. They stopped before completely entering the front yard and searched the expanse of grass for any threats. There was no one in sight, so they pressed on toward the gates.
“Maybe we should just stay here,” Walter offered.
“No,” Kara shook her head. She pointed to the open front gate. “Anyone could have gotten in. Besides, I saw Mrs. Walsh when we were separated. She seems to be one of them.”
Walter said nothing else on the subject as they neared the open gates. Kara took one last glance toward the house. She noted the beautifully arranged flowerbeds in front of them that were Mrs. Walsh’s pride and joy. Kara often walked by to see her tending to them and would stop for a chat. Now she was probably still trying to dig through that wall, her most ambitious project yet. Kara also noticed a curtain upstairs flutter and a shadow move behind it.
* * *
Walter poked his head out from the gate first and checked that the streets were clear. When he saw that they were, he waved the others forward. They hurried quickly out of Mrs. Walsh’s yard and down the sidewalk to Kara’s. Kara looked back again and saw someone running like a lunatic toward the house with the alarm going off. The alarm could still faintly be heard from as far as they were.
They reached the Taggart house gates and Kara punched in the code to unlock the person-sized door within them. She hurried through first and made sure the coast was clear, brandishing her cane like a sword. Alice and the dog followed her, then Walter closed the gate behind them and locked it. Kara had never been so relieved to be home. A weight felt like it had been lifted off her shoulders the moment the gate closed. She strode across her lawn, next to the doublewide driveway with confidence.
“This is your house?” Alice gasped.
Kara looked back to see the girl craning her head up to look at the top. The house was three stories with a high peaked attic. The walls were made of grey stone and the windows and doors were framed with a dark wood that matched the colour of the shingles.
“It’s like a castle!” Alice’s face lit up with delight. That smile made Kara feel surprisingly warm after what had happened, but she blamed it on the sun. That fireball in the sky had been relentless all day.
“How about we go inside and get you something to drink?” Walter placed his hand on the girl’s shoulder and directed her to the front door. Their feet crunched on the driveway’s gravel surface.
Kara stayed outside a moment longer. She looked at her own modest garden which she hired someone to tend, her two cars, a silver BMW M3 Sedan and a tan Jeep Wrangler, parked side by side, her small fountain that the driveway circled, depicting dolphins at play, and her security system of several cameras placed around the grounds, as well as motion detectors at the doors, and sensors in the window glass. For as rich as she was, she considered it rather modest. She actually owned her own island as a vacation spot but she liked living here just outside the city her father helped to build. The grounds weren’t that expansive and the reason her home was tall was to save space in other directions.
She went inside, took off her shoes, and placed them on a rack. She had several different pairs of shoes, but never more than one pair of any kind. Alice’s small shoes were sitting next to the rack. It had been a long time since a pair that size had been in her house. The last had probably been from one of her cousin’s children, now grown, who had been dragged to a party Kara held once a year. After a brief moment of reminiscing, she placed her cane in an umbrella stand and put her purse on a small table. Kara headed across the hardwood floors to her kitchen. This was the one room in the house she didn’t personally design; she had left it up to her part-time chef. Most of her food she made herself. Walter would cook sometimes, but whenever she had company over, Francois was called in. Just about everything was stainless steel with marble counter tops. Alice and Walter sat at the one little wooden table off in a corner. Alice was drinking a large glass of water while Walter made sandwiches. Shoes sat at Alice’s feet looking up at her.
“Do we have anything to feed the dog?” Kara asked her servant.
“He doesn’t eat until night time,” Alice informed her.
“I’ll just get him some water then.” She took out a large mixing bowl and filled it with water, then placed it near the dog. He looked up at
Kara, his eyes peering out at her from the flesh that sagged around them, then drank a few laps and lay down.
“What kind of sandwich would you like?” Walter asked Kara.
“I’ll make my own.” Kara first went over to a first aid kit kept in the kitchen. She rinsed the cut on her hand and then coated it with a clear, liquid Band-Aid. She would tell Walter to tend to his wound after he’d eaten. The fridge was her next stop where she found some leftover chicken.
“I’m having peanut butter and jelly,” Alice informed her.
Kara reheated a few slices of chicken and put them on some rye bread with Mayo. She sat down with the others.
“I had a milkshake at day-care,” Alice told them. “Mrs. Lou let us put whatever we wanted in it. It was really yummy.”
“Maybe later tonight we can make some more,” Walter suggested.
“And then my Daddy can try some!” Alice seemed to like this idea.
Kara had no idea how she was going to get in touch with Alice’s dad. “So your dad is a police officer?”
“Yup, he protects people,” Alice nodded and took a big bite out of her sandwich. She got grape jelly all over her face but didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s his name?” Kara took a more modest bite from her own sandwich and was careful not to slop.
“Sam Carter,” Alice told her.
“Well, when we’re done eating, I’ll try to contact him. Here.” Kara handed her a napkin. “You got jelly all over your face.”
Alice took the napkin and wiped her face haphazardly. She only wiped off some of it and the next chomp she took brought it all back.
Mrs. McGraw, Kara’s live-in maid, hurried into the kitchen then. “Ms. Taggart, I’m so glad you’re home. Something is wrong with Phillip.” Phillip was Mr. McGraw, her husband and Kara’s groundskeeper.
Kara rose from her seat and shoved the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth. Walter half rose as if to follow, but Kara held out a hand and stopped him.
“Stay with our guest,” Kara ordered after she swallowed.
Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel Paperback Page 36
