by Lynn Red
“Hnnnnng.”
“Right, well, can’t win ‘em all. At least you’re moving. That’s better than I managed last time I got you out of the dirt. How are those new legs working? Can you stand?”
Wordlessly, the enormous werebear stood.
“Fine, fine,” the old man said. “Looks like we might be on the right track.”
He poured another cup full of horror. That time, half a bat fell into it from somewhere up above. Atlas didn’t seem to notice.
“You do it yourself this time,” Jenga said. He began tapping his fingers on the side of his rickety book case, which was completely devoid of any books from the last century, before consciously stopping himself. “Take... take your time, yes... yes like that, pick it up and...”
Deliberately, slowly, but surely, Atlas bent from the waist just enough to wrap his massive hand around the little paper cup. He brought it to his lips, drank, and then chewed.
“What are you chewing?” Jenga shook his head. “Best not to know,” he said. “More?”
Atlas grunted and then spat out something that resembled chewing gum, but black. Jenga scooped it up into a little vial and shook it under a ceiling fan that didn’t work, except for the light. Whatever his old zombie friend spat out had a bunch of legs – none of them working very well anymore – and some kind of shiny shell.
Placing it on the end of one of his many workbenches, the overhead light flickered and died. Just afterwards, a loud banging sound from behind his house signaled the last of his backup generator’s energy.
Jenga’s face went gray.
“I didn’t want to do this,” he said. “I wanted to have a nice long chat, fill you up with liquor. But here we are. Ill-gotten gains bought me this place, got the lights, got the power and even this cable run all the way out here from town.”
“Hnnng?”
“Yes, you remember?” Jenga’s eyes lit up as he reminisced. “You were much more convincing in those days. I doubt anyone would take you for being alive anymore. Well, regular alive. I suppose you’re... animated? I don’t know quite what the right word is. The Eastern Witchdoctors Conference says zombies are alive only insofar as they can think. And you, well, I’m not sure where you fall on that scale.”
Atlas arched his eyebrows, slowly, and let out a long, low groan.
“I’m glad for one thing, old friend,” Jenga said as he ran his shaking fingers along a cut circling one of Atlas’s fingers. “I’m certainly glad you decided to begin falling apart before we started in with our new plan. Gave me time to patch you up. And honestly? I think you’re better than before.”
“Unng.”
“How good! How wonderful!” Jenga was almost jumping with excitement. “That was a new word! Before long you’ll be speaking, albeit slowly and in halting, confused sentences. But it’ll be almost like old times. You’ve never been exactly eloquent. Won’t that be wonderful? And then we can get you back to town and we can start paying the bills again.”
“Ung.” Atlas’s eyes turned downward. Very slowly, he shook his head.
“I know, I know, old friend,” Jenga said, patting Atlas’s giant shoulder. “I don’t like it any better than you do – the stealing and the sneaking. But the fact is that I have no choice. I’m so old, and there’s so very little to actually do in Jamesburg, that I can hardly get a job. And, after what happened last time I had an open medical practice, I don’t think selling tonics is an especially good idea.”
For a moment the two of them sat silent, Atlas staring at his feet.
“Well,” Jenga said, breaking the silence, “there’s no reason to feel down, is there? Nothing terrible happened when we did this before.”
“You.” Atlas said.
Jenga nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right – and glad to have you talking, by the way – I suppose you don’t have much to do with all this. It was a different time, too. But! There’s no reason to be down. We’ll get what we need and be on our way.”
Jenga poured another slug of junk, and pushed the cup toward Atlas who just stared at it without moving.
“You need your strength,” Jenga said. “Drink up, only a little more until you’ve had the last of it.”
Atlas just stared.
“Come on now,” Jenga said, putting his hands on his hips. “I really don’t want to have to act the part of a puppet master, but I will if you make me.” He scratched at his chin through his beard, which sent the knotted mass to jingling and jangling. “I know you don’t want to do this, but I’ve got no choice Atlas. It’s either we steal, or we give up all of this luxury.”
Looking around his house, he gazed fondly at a blender with one working motor out of two, the light dangling over his head, and then let his eyes fall on the thing he valued most – a seventy-two inch plasma television.
“Move?” Atlas groaned.
“Me? Move? To town?” Jenga waved his hand dramatically over his head, which irritated a lizard that had settled in his hat. “I’m so very happy you’re talking by the way, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. There’s no nature there, there’s no pretty things like this,” he snatched the scurrying lizard. “No, I just couldn’t. I don’t fit in there, I’m just a broken down old witchdoctor looking to enjoy my retirement. These old bones don’t have the energy for—”
“Jenga?” a woman’s voice from down by the road – some thirty feet from Jenga’s rickety door – startled him. She was quite excited.
“Jenga! Are you there! Where are you?” She was ruffling up the path, and Jenga was rubbing his temples.
“I don’t have energy for this, for her, not now. Can’t you do something, Atlas?” Jenga groaned massaging his nose. “Just I don’t know, hold her down or—”
“There you are!” Mary was a shrieking, wild-eyed, holy mess of a woman. Old doesn’t begin to describe her leathery skin, or her knobby, root-like fingers. “I’ve been asking after you from the road! Why are you not talking? Why are you so rude? Why won’t you say anything? Why won’t you talk? Atlas? I’m so tired of these zombies, Jenga, I’m sick of it.”
Moving his eyes around behind his closed lids, Jenga let out another impatient groan. “I’m not answering,” he said, “because you won’t let me get a word in. And what business is it of yours what I do with my time? Zombies weren’t illegal last I checked the ordinances.”
“No,” Mary said. “No, they’re not, but theft is! Scaring people isn’t but horrifying drunks and taking their money is illegal, Jenga! Doesn’t matter anyway, I’m fed up with your smells and the smoke and the noises, I told the Alpha!”
Jenga’s drooping eyelids shot open. “You did what? What did you tell him? I haven’t done anything.”
“I think I told him anyway. It might’ve been someone else. I think I told Leon, actually. Or maybe...”
“Mary!” Jenga shouted, grabbing the ancient woman’s shoulders. “Who did you tell what?”
“That you were going to rob the bank again. Like you did last time. Only I’m not sure I told anyone about that. And if I did they hardly believe anything I say on account of... well, I’m not quite certain why no one believes me. It’s my birthday after all, but no one believes me.”
“So you told... Leon? About my plan? How did you know about it?” Jenga started pacing, nervously, along the back of his dilapidated couch.
She shrugged. “I didn’t, I made it up. The smell is so awful with whatever you do all the time that I made it up to get you in trouble. I figured you did it once so you’d probably try it again. Only thing I didn’t figure on is you doing it the exact same way. So I guess I was right after all.”
Before he really knew what he was doing, Jenga backed Mary to the front door and distracted her for long enough that she forgot what she was talking about. As soon as she began wandering down the path back to her tree house, Jenga closed the door, turned and rested his back against the aged oak.
“I think,” he took a deep breath as Atlas turned his head and stared. He ev
en stared slowly. “That this just got a lot more complicated.”
-6-
The walk from my apartment to the courthouse, and then to my little office across from Erik’s took about ten minutes, but that afternoon it felt like ten hours.
My feet felt so heavy, that they matched my heart. I never thought this would happen, never in a million years. Everything was going so well, so perfectly, and I thought I’d finally gotten myself to a place with people who were just weird enough that I didn’t have to worry about who I was anymore.
But of course, who I was didn’t matter.
In the end, it was just what I was that was most important. Two years of making friends, making love, finding myself... all gone, and for what? Because I was born a human? Because I couldn’t turn into a peacock or a duck or, the way I felt right then, a jellyfish? I guess maybe I was blind or naive or something, because it came on so fast.
People joked of course about the human, about how I had to drive to get places and couldn’t fly, but I took them all as, well, jokes. Good natured ribbing.
And now I was supposed to believe it was all deep-seated anger at me for who I was?
I took the last turn around the long, slow slope of Maine Avenue, and stopped, staring at the front of the old Gothic-style courthouse. It was built sometime after the Civil War, Duggan told me once. The old one either burned down or got blown up in some kind of wizardry accident, but he thought it more likely that there was a kerosene spill.
The way this town went, I wasn’t so sure.
If the walk to the front of the courthouse felt like eternity, somehow turning the knob was even worse. An almost physical pain thumped into my chest when I put my key in the door, and groaned with effort as the lock clunked open.
Turning the knob and opening the door – for what was probably the last time – was an exercise in pain management. This place had turned into home for me; it had replaced a place I never wanted to be.
Luckily, Erik called a day of planning, so the town security council was meeting somewhere else. The old courthouse where our offices were was completely empty. If I’d had to look at anyone I probably would have screamed.
The house shoes I’d refused to change out of scuffed along the marble tiles. I passed an old statue of Davis Gerton III, the founder of Jamesburg. He was a werewolf back before it was cool. He came with pilgrims from England, evidently, but managed to keep himself human the whole time. No one ever knew about his lycanthropic condition even though there were two full moons during the journey. He was a symbol of self-reliance, toughness, and the single-minded drive to be solid and strong that the whole town used to build itself up.
He also wasn’t real.
But like Duggan said, sometimes reality doesn’t matter. Rather, the most important thing about a story is what we take from it, the lessons we learn.
I stared at Davis for a second. His long snout, his crooked back, if he was real, a wolf that looked like he did in the sculpture would be four-, maybe five-hundred years old. I shook myself and nodded to the statue in deference. “See ya ‘round,” I said to him, and went on my way.
By the time I got to the end of the hall, went up three flights of stairs, and got to the mayor’s office, which was across from mine, I’d just about resigned myself to what was happening. But when I opened the door, and the first thing I saw was Erik’s leather jacket thrown haphazardly across my desk, I almost came undone.
I grabbed the single framed picture I had – me and Erik and the miniature golf course two towns over – and dropped it face down into the shoebox I brought with me. Opening my drawers, I grabbed the folders full of paperwork and pictures that never got framed and pulled them out.
“Somethin’ got ya down?”
“Holy shit!” I cried out, jolting so hard I dropped a folder that burst all over the floor. A cascade of documents and stamps that were too old to use anymore slid halfway across the room. “Jamie?”
I looked up and sure enough, the bat lady was hanging from the vaulted ceiling above my desk. “What the hell are you doing here?”
She shrugged and gave me half a grin, then sneezed. “It’s quiet here when there are breaks. Government shuts down and the bats come home to roost.”
I snorted an empty laugh. “What brings you to my corner of the world? Seems like there’d be more comfortable places to go if you needed a nap.”
Jamie bared her little fangs in a Cheshire grin and then shrugged. “I thought something like this might happen.”
“You thought? You sure you don’t mean that you read my mind?”
She unrolled her wings and stretched, then wrapped back up. The way she was, it reminded me of a mummy, but a strikingly beautiful one with milk-colored skin and jet-black hair. Oh, and also not dead. As I watched, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I stole one of your oranges. Really good this time of year.” She paused for a second then apparently noticed my open mouth. “Well I can’t live on blood all the time. You have no idea how old it gets. Anyway, you’re too smart for me to pretend like there’s no reason I’m here.”
“I’m done,” I said. “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m leaving. Erik can go to hell for all I care.”
Boxing up three folders full of unframed pictures, I looked over at Jamie, whose wings were hanging limp at her sides.
“How do you keep your hair from falling when you’re upside down all the time?” Curiosity strikes me at the weirdest times.
“Tight bun,” she said. “Anyway, you can’t leave. I won’t let you.”
“Excuse me?” I said, taking her a little aback. “You won’t let me?”
She let her arms fall down and stretched them until her shoulders popped, then wrapped herself back up in those leathery, velveteen wings. “Maybe that was a little bit strong,” Jamie said. “But I won’t let you leave without at least knowing why.”
“Why what? Why I’m leaving? Why do you even care, is my question. I’m just a pureblood human. I don’t fit in here, right?”
I dropped my box of folders with a little more of a thud than I expected then blew a fallen curl out of my face. The half day since I last saw Erik was starting to get to me, I guess. As much as he’d gone on about addiction, it was me who was feeling the pangs of withdrawal. This was the longest I’d gone without... well, gone without, since we started in with the torrid, secret affair.
There was an ache in the middle of me, and it wasn’t just one that needed physical satisfaction. I missed the way he threw his hair around. I missed the way he looked at me, and the way he made me feel. But most of all, I missed his voice, soft sometimes, and sometimes gravelly, lusty and hard.
“You’re torn up, and that bothers me because for all my cool acting, I hate seeing people sad,” Jamie said. “It’s not just about Erik, either. I’ve been around long enough to know that look.” Jamie took a deep breath. “Christ, have I been around long enough. And the reason I care is because I always liked you, even if it isn’t really my thing to act like it. Semi-related to that, you’re good for Erik. He’s my friend, and besides; what’s good for the alpha is good for the town.”
She took a deep breath, reached out, and tapped me on the head when I looked away. “Scratch that. You’re the best thing for Erik, not just good for him.”
“Really?” I said.
I happened to look down into my box and see a picture of my preacher uncle. Immediately, my thoughts turned to Ohio, back to my family, and all the things I’d left behind.
“What’s wrong?” Jamie asked. “Something in the box got you upset?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just... pictures of people I haven’t seen in a while.”
With smoothness that would make an Olympic gymnast jealous, Jamie pulled one clawed foot, then another, off the rafter where she hung, and flipped to the ground, landing without a sound. She slid her hand around my face and turned me toward her.
“I�
�m not going to read your mind,” Jamie said. “Haven’t. That’s rare. Usually the first thing I do is plumb the depths and see what there is to see. You’re different, though.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied again and took another short glance at Uncle Ted. I shook my head just a little from side to side in a way that I thought imperceptible but that obviously wasn’t. “It’s just pictures.”
Jamie sighed heavily. “Suit yourself,” she said. “I can’t make you talk. I’ll let you keep your secrets, whatever they are, but I have to say something about the other thing. Erik is... well, I know about you and him, because I’m not an idiot. And I’ve never seen him this happy. But... you have to understand what a huge thing it is to go from the two of you being a casual item to you being the alpha’s actual, official mate.”
I looked up at her, my eyes pregnant with tears though I wasn’t entirely sure why – I guess a mixture of bad memories, everything with Erik, and the impending possibility that I was headed right back to Ohio and right back into all those terrible memories was just too much. “I don’t want this to be over,” I said. “I can’t take it. I can’t take all the drama and the politics and...”
I sniffed and trailed off.
“This shit did come on pretty quick, huh?”
“It’s all this... Oh my God, why am I telling you this?” I groaned and ran my hand through my hair.
“Because you obviously need to tell someone, and I’m here,” she said. Jamie paced to the door, and then returned. She moved like a shadow gliding along the floor, her clawed feet seemed to just slide along the ground.
Her fingertips on my cheek were strangely warm. “Sit,” she said. “Let me guess, this is about the old alpha’s...”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t need to bother. I sat, let out a long sigh and turned my eyes upward, staring at Jamie and waiting for her to talk so I didn’t have to acknowledge the insanity running through my head.
Instead, she just stared back. “Any day now,” she said.
I took a deep breath, concentrating on the beat of my own heart to try and calm my thoughts. “It’s... I don’t know. This is so embarrassing. I feel like a high school reject.”
