by Chism, Holly
I pushed the cart to the check-outs, and moved through the self-check as quick as I could, eyes down, and avoiding drawing more attention to myself than I had to, to not freak out the Walmart associate watching the self-check lanes when things started moving and beeping without anybody being there.
I’d learned how to do that with long practice.
I hurried out, past someone sitting on the bench, looking like they’d just got off work and were waiting on a ride, and left for home.
Roomies, Yes. Buddies? Maybe.
The glowing, red numbers on the cheap clock radio on the cheap, small, plastic set of extra storage shelves between the head of what stood in for my bed and the wall told me that I was spot on a full dark wakeup for a cloudless day in early October in northern Kansas: right at 7:00 pm. I laid in my semi-comfortable twin makeshift platform bed and contemplated the events of the evening before with a bit of disbelief. And a bit more discomfort.
I could not believe I’d invited a complete stranger to move in upstairs, and had rushed out to get groceries before I’d gone down for the night. And honestly, I was kind of dreading facing her again. I was absolutely sure I was going to fuck up and freak her out. I really didn’t want to do that, but I was way out of practice in day-to-day social situations. And my roommate had not prepared me for how to greet someone you share a house with, but not a bed. Nor did I remember what I’d picked up through watching friends on whose couches I’d crashed between the time I fled the room and the time I found a quiet studio by myself. During the time I hoped that my complaints to campus housing would get some kind of results that would allow me to remain on campus.
In twenty years of minimal face to face contact with the species, it’s easy to forget how to be human. Or, at least, pretend to be.
Yes, I’d been looking for someone to hire for daytime work, but I’d been planning on running an ad, interviewing for and getting to know someone, then maybe handing over a key—not inviting them to move into the master suite.
But…Andi had really impressed me with her guts. I’ve never even heard of a near-victim of rape doing anything other than getting as far away as humanly possible as fast as humanly possible—not unless they were too drunk to realize what had nearly happened. Which, now that I thought of it, I saw on a weekly basis, with the same, stupid, drunk co-eds changing over every four years or so, but never, ever, with a violent attack. Andi coming back to try to help, but not either running away or trying to kill me when she saw me for what I was…was beyond my comprehension. And that made her interesting. Unique.
I still don’t know what possessed me to offer her the upstairs. I was hoping to still be glad that I had.
I sighed, reached up to the shelf above the clock, and twisted the knob on the cheap, gray, students’ gooseneck lamp I’d gotten at Walmart in their markdown aisle after the last one had started going through lightbulbs like a chain smoker goes through cigarettes. Twisted the wrong way, at first (like I did every damn sunset, swore up and down I was going to not do, or else that I was going to get a pull-chain banker’s lamp), before I got it twisted right to turn it on. It took a second for the spiral CFL (stupid regulations and bans) to warm up enough to really give enough light to let me sort through the clothes in the drawers under my bed. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, so I just grabbed a set of sweats. I needed to do laundry tonight, I decided, as I glanced at the hamper tucked between the end of my bed and the wall next to the door. I was running out of clean underwear.
Which reminds me—I forgot to show Andi the built-on back porch where the laundry room lives, at the far end of the hall from the front door.
I rolled from my belly onto my back, swinging my legs around to dangle above the floor. It’d taken some searching to find the bed I had—basically, a dresser wide and deep enough for a twin sized mattress to mostly fit on top—but it was well worth it. No way would even a small chest of drawers fit into this six-by-eight foot room with the bed, and the three-drawer cart the shelves sat on that served to hold my socks, underwear, and…personal stuff.
Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I don’t have needs.
And why am I talking to myself like this?
I sighed, again, hopping off the edge of the bed and into my pants, trying to remember if I’d reacted to nerves like this when I’d still been alive.
And I honestly couldn’t. Could not remember. Not even a hint of a niggling feeling one way or the other.
I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: the brunette upstairs, or the fact that I was forgetting my life from before I’d been turned into what I was now.
I sat down with the rolled-up socks I’d fished out of the drawer and thought for a minute. I’d been twenty-eight when I died; I’d been dead but not really for twenty years. Actually, twenty-one, just before Christmas. I’d been dead for almost half my life.
So to speak.
I shoved my feet into a pair of thick socks, and pulled my hair back out of my face in a scrunchie. I desperately wanted a shower for the warmth, but decided to wait until my small load of clothes was in the dryer, first. One of the things needing replaced is the hot water heater—the poor thing cannot handle my washer, even running on cold/cold, while I take a shower.
I grabbed the basket, tossed the clothes I’d slept in on top, then gathered up my courage to go upstairs.
Where, apparently, Andi was waiting.
“Hey, Meg,” she called as she wandered out of the kitchen. “Sleep okay?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. I don’t ever really remember anything but conking out, anymore,” I replied. “You?”
“I love that bedroom,” she gushed. “Oh, do you want to make up a priorities list of the things you want done around here? I did take the liberty of getting started today with a few little things, like calling around as best I could to get a guy out for a quote on the downstairs bathroom floor rebuild, but I want to know what you want done.”
I cocked my head to stare at the bubbly brunette—who didn’t look nearly as chunky dressed in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved tee shirt as she had in the sweats. No, curvy was more the correct word. “Glad you like your room,” I said finally. “Thanks for getting started. What did you get done, by the way?”
“I plugged in your fridge. It kinda seemed to work, but wasn’t getting cold, so I checked some options online. My best guess was that it needed coolant, but the how-to videos didn’t seem like anything I wanted to tackle, so I looked up appliance repair. Repair guy was out and done and gone within about three hours of my call. So, now you have a working fridge.” She looked very pleased with herself. “Which means that I can go get some other stuff to go with what you got—thanks for that, by the way. Crackers and summer sausage is one of my favorite treats, but I don’t eat it often. It goes to waist.”
I blinked, wondering if she always talked this much. Then wondered what she meant: if she ate the sausage, then it wouldn’t go to waste—oh. Pun.
Then realized that I was still sluggish with either sleep or what passed for it for me. “Um. No problem. I wasn’t sure if the fridge worked. It was here when I bought the place, but I haven’t ever messed with it or the cook stove beyond unplugging them.”
“Do you have a washer/dryer hookup? Because I’m here and can be here for deliveries, now, if you don’t,” she said, eyeing my basket.
“I have a working washer and dryer. They’re pretty new—I went and got them myself, with a rented truck, last winter. I’ve hooked things like that up before, so that wasn’t a problem. Follow me,” I said, nodding toward the end of the hall. “They’re out that door down there. I’m surprised you didn’t find them on your own.”
She shrugged. “Well, after getting the fridge taken care of, I had to run into town and check to see if there was anywhere that would be willing to let me run the bail bonding out of their offices. Found a pawn shop that was willing to set up a desk in the corner—that should do for now. I don’t want to do that out of here. Not safe
.”
I gave her a flat look as I squeezed the basket between my arm and my hip to open the door. “You have a vampire in the basement. You know, pretty much invulnerable, stronger than any man?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but this is your home.”
“So? Set your hours in the evenings after I’m up, and think of it like a pizza delivery. I would.” I turned away to hide the smirk lurking at the corners of my mouth. She gaped at me, then the corners of her mouth twitched. Then, she burst into giggles.
After I’d gotten my clothes dumped in and the washer started, I nudged a still-giggling Andi out of the way, and herded her down the hall toward the office—and the coffee pot. Which was just finishing a cycle. One I hadn’t pushed the button to start, yet.
Maybe I’d made the right decision with asking Andi to move in, after all.
I wandered across the room and filled the cup I’d emptied the night before, a few minutes before I’d left for shopping. “So, anything interesting happen today?” I asked after approximately half a cup’s worth of silence. Punctuated by occasional giggles.
“Well, I found the food you brought in. And the papers. And your note. I’ve been doing research on that storm shelter, and I think our best bet is actually Home Depot. And I found out I had to go back into town for a couple other things like cereal and milk, but I did get some calls made about repairs. And I got online and looked around for repair guys. That’s really hard to actually find—the majority of the construction firms I contacted are either not in the area, or not interested in a small change job. Somebody’s scheduled to come out to look into the bathroom floor repair down here tomorrow morning, though, and what all needs to be replaced in there. Is there a household account I can get access to? I spent my last dime to get the fridge repaired.” The babble suddenly stopped, and Andi looked away from me and picked at the cuticles on her left fingernails with her right ones. It—and she—looked incredibly uncomfortable.
“Hang on,” I said, digging through the drawer where I kept the cash I’d liberated from rapists. I pulled out all of what I had hoarded, and started counting. “Looks like there’s plenty,” I muttered as I passed the four-figure mark and kept going. “Last night’s wad put us at around twenty-seven hundred.”
“That’s helpful,” she said, voice faint with shock. “That should cover at least some of the repairs you need. And a new TV. Yours died a gruesome death, this morning. There were sparks, then lines, then a loud pop, then smoke. I unplugged it.”
I blinked. “Oh. I hadn’t watched it in forever, but yeah, we can get a new one.”
Andi grinned. “Wanna go get one now? And maybe a couple of movies?”
I didn’t remember the last time I’d gone shopping with a friend, even for just necessities. I hadn’t had any since I’d graduated college—too busy. Then, too dead. I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I hedged. “I mean…”
“The markets aren’t open, yet,” she prompted. “I checked.”
“Why the hell not?” I decided. “If that’s what you want to do, then sure.”
She squealed, and lunged in to hug me, then pulled back. “Brr. You are cold,” she said, shivering.
“Well, yeah,” I said drily. “Walking corpse. I tend to take on room temperature, and it’s not exactly warm, down in my basement.”
She snorted, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, as if that’s all you are. Try more like my own personal superhero. Go on. Change into something besides your sweats. We’ll go play Walmart tag or something while we get the shopping done. Hey, how long have you been, y’know, walking dead?”
“Twenty years,” I said, smirking. “Try to not give me away out in public. You’d be surprised by how superstitious people are. And I’d rather not be set on fire or beheaded, thanks.”
Andi snorted again. “As if. I wouldn’t do that to you, and I won’t let anybody in your house, unless they’re going to be fixing it. Hey, can I get a look at the basement?”
“Sure,” I said, blinking. Mystified. I shook my head—not to tell her no, but to try to shake loose the feeling of being punch drunk—and headed through into the hall, where the door to the cellar sat under the stairs up to the second floor, between the living room and the family room. “Go ahead and come down for a look. There’s a root cellar down there, and I sleep in the storm shelter.”
“How much is finished?” she asked, following me down the stairs.
I yanked the string on the light over the stairs without saying a word. The stairs down went up against a foundation wall to my right, and the basement itself stretched under the downstairs bath, hall, and kitchen/dining room side of the house. The rest of the walls were braced, lime-washed dirt, and the floor was plain dirt. There were shelves built against the walls, but the bases were rotting. The storm shelter was a cinder block bunker with a simple closet-type door. “Not a whole lot. The storm shelter, there, is it. And it’s not very big.”
I opened the door, and her eyes widened. “There’s not even a lock on that doorknob,” she murmured. “Looks like the door is a hollow core closet door, too. Is that really even a storm shelter?”
“I don’t think it really qualifies, no,” I said. “But that’s what it was billed as. And I really needed the basement bedroom.”
She sat down on the steps just above the dirt floor we stood on, chewing thoughtfully on her left index knuckle while I stepped into my room, turned on my lamp, and closed the door to get dressed. I pulled out jeans, a solid, bright leaf green tee shirt, and a brown pullover hoodie with a deep v-neck, scrambling to strip off the sweats and dress quickly. I realized with a bit of wonder that I was excited. I was excited for a chance to hang out with someone I hoped was becoming a friend. Nervous as hell, but excited.
I opened the door to find Andi still sitting on the steps, but she’d shifted back up to the middle, and was eyeing the whole room. The unfinished part was a good bit bigger than the finished part—my finished part was less than a third of the whole. There was another fifteen feet or so of unfinished length, and a bit over ten feet of width—one side I knew had dirt just beyond the foundation wall, but the other foundation wall was under the load bearing wall on the living room side. I assumed the basement was excavated when the first part of the house was built, and the rest of the house was added later, without a basement beneath it. “I had an idea,” Andi said slowly. “How about installing a real storm shelter? Like just to one side of the back porch? Then once that’s in, we can get the rest of this finished out. I saw your sleeping space when you opened your door, and it’s tiny.”
I nodded. “That might work. Thank you for thinking of it.”
She grinned, pushing herself up to her feet and heading up the stairs. “That way, I don’t feel quite so bad for taking that gorgeous master bedroom. Can I have a free hand with getting this fixed up down here after we get the storm shelter done?” she tossed back over her shoulder.
“Sure,” I chuckled, following and yanking the string to turn off the light. “I won’t even peek.”
“Awesome. Who’s driving?”
I thought for a minute. If she’d gone broke fixing my fridge…I wasn’t sure how much gas she had, but figured she’d need every little bit to get in and do the work she had set up. “How about I drive? Save your gas for getting in to work the bail bonding desk you set up?”
Andi grimaced as she grabbed her jacket out of the tiny coat closet next to the door on the kitchen side of the hall. “Yeah, that makes sense,” she admitted. “Thanks.”
“Let me grab my purse,” I said.
Andi froze, then eyed me in surprise. “You carry a purse?” she said blankly.
“Well, yeah,” I said drily. “Where else would I carry my wallet, my keys, my wet wipes to clean the blood from my lips, and my hairbrush?”
“Good point,” she said, following me out the door to where I’d left the car parked the night before. “But not something I would have considered.”
“I’m dead, not male,”
I snarked. “Besides. I had guy friends in college that said they thought we females lucked out in the ‘carry shit around with you’ department.”
“Yeah, well,” she sputtered. “They lucked out on the comfy shoes and clothes that work on fat people department. I mean, seriously. Heather gray in regular sizes is manatee gray in plus sizes.”
I snorted, then choked on a giggle. “Say what, now?”
“It’s pretty common. People complain, and one thing gets changed, but other things are still labeled the same. And the extra fabric on the fat clothes always drives the price up. But the insult added to injury is the worst.” Andi eyed my scrawny figure. “Not that you’d ever have had the same problem,” she said.
“No,” I admitted. “I routinely forgot to eat when I got busy, and was mildly anorexic in high school because it was all the rage. And I still frequently have trouble finding things in the adult section of the clothes to fit.”
“God have mercy,” she blurted out, staring at me instead of fastening her seat belt. “A serious psychological eating disorder was trendy?”
“Keep in mind, hon,” I said gently. “I’m probably your mother’s age, rather than yours, no matter what I look like. There were a lot of things that were trendy that shouldn’t have been. Like Anne Rice.”
Andi finished fastening her seat belt with a sigh. “Anne Rice wrote better vampires than Stephanie Meyer.”
I glanced in my rearview mirrors, then twisted around to back up without hitting the Mustang. “Honey, everybody writes better vampires that Stephanie Meyer, but she’s the one sleeping on pallets of cash.”
The trip into town was quiet. Andi stared through the window, chewing on her bottom lip. As we got close to city limits, she glanced at her watch. “Hey, can we head to Home Depot, first? I want to get started with the storm shelter tonight.”
I shrugged, maneuvering to get on Kimball from Tuttle Creek Boulevard. “Sure. Might get a microwave from there, too.”
