With lightning speed, the woman grabbed Megan by the shoulders with both arms. She sat up, her entire body creaking and cracking yet moving with a quickness that Megan had never even seen in a completely healthy person. Megan screamed, partly out of shock and partly at the red hot touch of the woman’s hands that burned right through Megan’s coat to singe the skin underneath.
“Help,” the woman said again. There was no longer any sign of weakness in her voice. Her voice was strong, deep, throaty, and very clearly not human. Her charred lips curled back in a grim parody of a smile, giving Megan a clear view of the woman’s teeth. All of them pointed. All of them sharp. All of them dripping with some kind of mucous-colored ichor like venom.
“Help me,” she said again, then opened her mouth wide and came at Megan.
Megan’s scream was short.
Two
“No, I will not have sex with you,” Angie Zwiersky said. Doug looked at her with a cocked head and a confused expression, as though he couldn’t possibly consider a world where the words might be true. He was used to everyone giving him everything he wanted, after all. Simply hearing the word “no” shocked his system, especially when it came to Angie. He’s spent a great deal of time wrapping her around his little finger, so to speak.
Doug licked his lips and let his tongue hang out. He probably didn’t actually have the slightest idea what any of the words she’s said meant other than “no,” but he knew exactly the goofy expression needed to change her mind. He used this for exactly three seconds before he apparently forgot what he was doing and turned around on himself to lick his balls.
Doug was a wiener dog.
“No, I will not have sex with you,” Angie said to him again. This time she didn’t get any reaction at all from the dachshund, not that she expected or wanted one. She was just practicing, after all. Boris Romanov down at the credit union had been coming into the Gitchigumi Café for the last two weeks right around dinner time and demanding more attention from her than she was prepared to give at the busiest time of the day (even if “busy” at this time of year was a relative term). There was no mistaking what he actually wanted from her, considering his not-so-subtle hints. Of course, he hadn’t cared about her one way of the other until she had come out as bi. Boris must have somehow conflated being attracted to both sexes with being easy. Angie’s attempts to let him down gently had led nowhere. Now she was practicing a less gentle approach.
“Okay then, how about this?” Angie asked Doug. “Stop making passes at me or else I’ll cut off your balls and serve them in the chili.”
The mention of balls momentarily got Doug’s attention, as though he were worried the balls about to come off were his own. Once it appeared that wasn’t the case, he went back to joyfully cleaning them with his tongue.
Angie took a drag from her cigarette and then flicked the ashes away from Doug. The Gitchigumi Café had been smoke free since before Angie had ever taken her first puff, but they had never quite figured out what to do with all the smokers who still frequented it. Angie stood outside the back door on her break, using the dumpster next to her as her ashtray. Every time she did this, Doug appeared from wherever he went when no one was around. He always appeared well-fed and moderately well-groomed, yet no one knew who might own him or even if Doug was his real name. He responded to it, at least. Any attempt to catch him in the past had failed. He was just a cute, doofy little mystery that didn’t mind Angie venting to him.
She stubbed out the butt of her cigarette on the brick wall, blew one last cloud of smoke into the frigid air, and then bent low to say good-bye to Doug. She’d try to pet him, but she knew from experience that he wouldn’t let her touch him. Feed him scraps of bacon out of her hand, maybe, but that was it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Doug. Don’t worry. Your balls will be safe until then.”
Doug chuffed as though to thank her, then waddled off between the diner and closed souvenir shop next door, vanishing to who-knew-where.
When Angie went back in, Rudy looked up from his newspaper just long enough to confirm it was her then went back to it. He was seated on an empty upside-down pickle bucket, a common habit with him that ensured he somehow always smelled like pickles even outside of work. Rudy was the head cook, a man of indeterminate yet definitely elderly age that had been part of the package when Angie had bought into the café. There were things he should probably be cleaning, but he never did any of that and pretty much ignored anyone asking him to. It was the kind of thing that might get him fired anywhere else, but here in Mukwunaguk his cooking was as much one of the tourist attractions as the historical museum or the lighthouse. Rudy might not be one of the owners of the café, but as far as most of the residents of Mukwunaguk were concerned, this place belonged to him just as much as anyone else.
Jasmine, Angie’s aunt and partner in this particular operation, was in the back office working on paperwork. She ignored Angie completely, as she was completely immersed in the delicate operation of figuring out how to keep the café from going too far into the red now that tourist season was completely behind them. During the summer, the café hired on a few high schoolers to help wait tables or do the dishes, but at the moment the three of them were the entire crew of the Gitchigumi Café. They barely even had the money to pay themselves sometimes during the winter. Angie had learned the hard way in her first year as part owner to save as much as she could during the summer rather than spending all her extra money on frivolities, because by the end of the winter she might very well be living on canned beans and whatever leftovers the café wanted to throw away.
It almost wasn’t worth being open in the winter at all, but enough locals still stopped in on a regular basis that neither Angie nor Jasmine would think of shuttering it. It was a Sunday evening, so that meant even the regular bunch would be diminished, but there would still be five or six that Angie could set her watch by, and probably a couple more that would stop by to take the sting off watching their football team lose about an hour ago.
Angie got to work making sure the ketchup bottles on each of the tables were full. Other than waitressing, that would be her exciting task for the day. Later, after the gray November day became a starless November night, they would close up the café and she would head home to curl up in with a trashy romance novel before passing out, only to wake early the next morning to do it all over again. It was a humdrum existence, everything she had been afraid of becoming when she was in high school.
Which made it odd that she had never in her life felt so alive.
The Gitchigumi Café had always been her fate. She’d known that ever since she was a tiny child. She’d been raised in this restaurant, more or less literally. After her mother had abandoned them, her father had tried to make ends meet however he could. Angie had a few vague memories of living in places other than Mukwunaguk before that, but her father had brought her back here to his hometown because, other than Angie, Jasmine was the only family he had left. She’d been running the café for a couple years by then, and at first her father had done little more than help out with odd jobs while he looked for what he called “a real job.” He thought he’d be able to get work at the toothpick factory, the only real industry besides tourism that still existed here, but that had shut down shortly after they moved here. It was funny, thinking how that little bit of timing had affected Angie’s entire life. Had he moved here just six months later, he probably could have gotten work when the factory was redone on a smaller scale manufacturing chopsticks that were exported to China.
Instead, he’d become more invested in the café. Her father had rarely been at home, especially after Aunt Jasmine had offered him half the business. Rather than spend her time as a latchkey kid at home, her father had made her come here every day after school. She would do her homework in one of the back booths, read, color, and generally entertain or annoy any customers that came in. Rudy himself said that she was another tourist attraction at that time, the whip-smart kid cra
cking jokes as a permanent fixture of the café. She’d even been featured in a travel magazine once that had come to do a piece on the museum and lighthouse.
As a teenager, though, she’d begun to chafe at small town life. It was typical, she supposed, to want to see what else was out there. It had bewildered her that people would come to this place on their vacations. Why would anyone want to spend their hard-earned money on Mukwunaguk? Was that decrepit old lighthouse really that special? Was there anything in the museum, if it could really be called that, that was worth seeing? Why would anyone want to visit a giant empty expanse of water? These people were fools in her mind and she, oh wise and great fifteen year old that she had been, was the only one who could see it.
Then her dad had died, and her life had been pulled out from underneath her. Aunt Jasmine was the one who took care of her for those three remaining years before she was legally considered an adult, and she had also been the one to give Angie her first job. Waitressing, of course. The tips hadn’t been enough to save for college, though, and her father’s life insurance had been pretty paltry. Her last couple years of high school had felt like a long never-ending funk that she would never get out of. There was no way she would ever leave this God-forsaken town.
On her eighteenth birthday, though, Aunt Jasmine had pulled her aside and revealed to her what had been a part of her father’s will- his share of the business. He’d wanted her to have it, with Jasmine holding on to her share of the profits until she was eighteen. That alone wouldn’t be enough for college, but Jasmine had told her that if she wanted to sell her half then she had a buyer in mind, an out-of-towner who thought he could turn the place into even more of a tourist trap. Jasmine hadn’t exactly been thrilled about some of this guy’s ideas, such as shutting down the café during the winter and adding to the menu, as Rudy called them, “frou-frou coffee drink shit.” But Jasmine had been willing to make that sacrifice if it was what it took to make Angie happy. The savings plus the money from the sale would be enough that she could leave Mukwunaguk, maybe even go to college if she only went to a bargain-basement tech school. It had been all Angie’s choice.
To the surprise of everyone, not the least of who was Angie herself, she stayed. There were occasions where she regretted the decision, but not often. She was more regretful that staying here had probably played a part in how long it took her to come to grips with her own sexuality. But she had grown to love the town itself, and the Gitchigumi Café in particular. She may have had a nearby apartment where she lived, but the café was her actual home.
There were plenty of times where she wondered what life would have been like if she had left, but she thought she had done well with herself. The money Aunt Jasmine had saved up for her went for correspondence courses, for everything from computer repair to learning Russian. She’d actually been more happy with that than she believed she ever would have been with a formal education. She knew a little about a lot, and she liked how that made her feel like she had a secret that most of the people around here would never get from her.
Although her dating life did suck. That much she had to admit. Beyond Boris and his feeble attempts to get in her pants, there wasn’t much in the way of action around here.
And speak of the devil, there he was. Angie could see out the front window as Boris Romanov walked down Main Street, obviously heading straight for the diner. She supposed he was good-looking, in his own way. His nose was a bit crooked thanks to a fight he had once been in (he claimed it was a bar fight, but Angie had it on good authority that it was actually from a fist fight over a Power Ranger action figure that he’d gotten into when he was five), but he spent a lot of time cultivating a tall, dark, and brooding air about himself. Too bad his actual personality didn’t match. He acted like someone who had seen the cover of one of Angie’s romance novels, decided he could be like that, and then tried to mimic the covers without having even the slightest clue what was inside.
“I will not have sex with you,” she muttered. For maximum effect, she would need to say it loud and with plenty of other people listening. Doing that to anyone else would have seemed mean, but after putting up with Boris’s skeezy come-ons a little too often lately, she thought he deserved to be knocked down a peg.
Before he could even make it to the café though, the door opened and Kim Howzer walked in. She didn’t walk in using a completely straight line, so Angie guessed she had to be on something illicit again, but the line wasn’t quite wobbly enough to be booze. Angie would have guessed prescription pain killers if it wasn’t for the woman’s well-known pill-phobia. Angie wasn’t a particular fan of the woman but she reserved all of her outright dislike for Boris and a few other rare people around town. Kim kept to herself and, except for the occasional paranoid rant, didn’t bother anyone, although there was plenty of gossip that her daughter Megan had had a rough childhood under the woman’s thumb. Angie had spent some time with Megan as a child, mostly out of sympathy, but Megan had pulled away from anyone and everybody at an early age. Angie still got sad thinking about it.
“Hi Kim,” Angie said to her as she walked (although every move she ever made was more like a scuttle) to her usual place, a far booth right next to the one Angie had spent so much time in as a child. “The usual?”
Kim smiled and nodded, although she didn’t make eye contact with Angie. She never made eye contact with anyone. Angie was pretty sure she would be hard pressed to find anyone in Mukwunaguk that knew the woman’s eye color.
Angie went up to the order window that separated the dining room from the kitchen and yelled through it. “Kim’s usual!” It was the normal ritual but ultimately pointless. Rudy had already folded his paper, gotten off his pickle bucket, and was throwing an order of hash browns into a pan.
As was usually the case at this time of day, Kim’s arrival was like a seal had been broken, finally allowing other customers to enter the diner. Boris entered, sitting at a stool next to the counter so he could be within flirting distance of Angie whenever she needed to work the register. Angie yelled for his usual and Rudy threw on a couple hamburger patties and some bacon. Just a few minutes later, the Kincaids came in. On any other day of the week, they would have been all over each other as they sat in their booth, the perfect picture of slightly-inappropriate-for-a-public-place newlywed bliss. This was Sunday though, which meant Beth was wearing her Lions jersey and Kevin was in his Packers gear. Given the outcome of today’s games, neither of them would be speaking to each other for the rest of the night, their entire dinner here going without conversation until, Angie assumed, their wild make-up sex made everything better between them later. They were some of the uncommon customers that didn’t have a usual preference for their food and Angie had to perform the rare task of actually taking an order.
The Kincaids were followed closely by Old Bert (if he had a last name or had ever been known as Young Bert, it was apparently a secret he intended to keep to his grave). Angie got him a bowl of chili without even asking. A few minutes later, Becca Schuster and Johnny Hammerling came in, both of them inappropriately dressed for the weather in workout clothes. Becca was the yoga instructor at the town’s one small excuse for a gym while Johnny was the place’s most frequent customer. Becca was generally nice if a little on the spacey side. Johnny was super attractive, but Angie knew now that she would never see what he looked like under those sweats. An interesting side effect of her coming out of the closet was that everyone else suddenly seemed comfortable talking to her about their own sexualities or preferences. Johnny had told her that he was asexual and aromantic. His deep friendship with Becca was as close as he wanted to get to intimacy.
Angie brought them both salads and realized that would probably be it for tonight. Given the weather, which looked like it was preparing to give Mukwunaguk its first snowfall of the year, there might be one or two other people who would come in before closing to get a coffee or a hot chocolate or a bowl of soup, but beyond that these were her customers toni
ght. She set about to make them feel just as at home here as she did.
She managed to go nearly half an hour before Boris reached out over the counter and tried to touch her arm. Uck. Sometimes the guy had no sense of personal space.
“So how you doing tonight, Ang?” he asked. He’d never called her Ang before she’d revealed that she liked both men and women. Hell, he hadn’t even called her Angie. She’d been Angela to him, very stiff and formal. Now, though, he seemed to think that his own pet name for her would be the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. Or got her on her back. Something like that. Honestly, Angie wasn’t sure what ever went through this guy’s head, and she didn’t think she wanted to, either.
“Keeping busy,” she said out loud, but in her mind all she kept repeating was I will not have sex with you, over and over. She just needed to wait for the right moment. If she made the moment just embarrassing enough for him, maybe he would learn to keep his hands to himself.
“So busy that you can’t get that drink you promised me after work?”
“Yep, exactly that busy,” she said. In truth, neither of the two bars currently operating in town would still be open by the time she closed down the café tonight. The only place they would be able to get drinks would be at his place. Angie had no intention of ever learning what the inside of his apartment looked like.
She also hadn’t ever promised him anything of the sort, but if she openly denied it she was afraid he would push the matter further, using some obscure, vague insult she’d given him at some point as proof that she had indeed promised exactly that.
“Come on, someone as beautiful as you has to have some other plans tonight. I want to join in.”
“Beautiful, huh?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. Despite all his previous efforts, it was the first time he’d given her a real compliment.
Infernal Corpse: A Zombie Novel Page 2
