Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  Not at this time, they said. Right now they were only asking questions.

  And I was her alibi.

  A pretty damn good one at that.

  I got the train back to Manhattan. I stood in the cool misty rain at Penn Station wondering which was likely to be more dangerous—going back there and calling as I’d promised her I would or never going back there again and never ever calling her at all.

  The answer would have been obvious. Except for the last thing she’d said to me.

  The last thing she said before I fell asleep.

  Well, she’d sung it, actually.

  And me, I’d smiled.

  You’re caught in a trap. You can’t walk out. Because I love you too much, baby.

  I thought she had a really good voice. A nice husky alto.

  It didn’t surprise me.

  The Visitor

  For Neal McPheeters

  The old woman in bed number 418B of Dexter Memorial was not his wife. There was a strong resemblance though. Bea had died early on.

  He had not been breathing well that night, the night the dead started walking, so they had gone to bed early without watching the news though they hated the news and probably would have chosen to miss it anyway. Nor had they awakened to anything alarming during the night. He still wasn’t breathing well or feeling much better the following morning when John Blount climbed the stairs to the front door of their mobile home unit to visit over a cup of coffee as was his custom three or four days a week and bit Beatrice on the collarbone, which was not his custom at all.

  Breathing well or not Will pried him off her and pushed him back down the stairs through the open door. John was no spring chicken either and the fall spread his brains out all across their driveway.

  Will bundled Beatrice into the car and headed for the hospital half a mile away. And that was where he learned that all across Florida—all over the country and perhaps the world—the dead were rising. He learned by asking questions of the harried hospital personnel, the doctors and nurses who admitted her. Bea was hysterical having been bitten by a friend and fellow golfer so they sedated her and consequently it was doubtful that she ever learned the dead were doing anything at all. Which was probably just as well. Her brother and sister were buried over at Stoneyview Cemetery just six blocks away and the thought of them walking the streets of Punta Gorda again biting people would have upset her.

  He saw some terrible things that first day.

  He saw a man with his nose bitten off—the nosebleed to end all nosebleeds—and a woman wheeled in on a gurney whose breasts had been gnawed away. He saw a black girl not more than six who had lost an arm. Saw the dead and mutilated body of an infant child sit up and scream.

  The sedation wore off. But Bea continued sleeping.

  It was a troubled, painful sleep. They gave her painkillers through the IV and tied her arms and legs to the bed. The doctors said there was a kind of poison in her. They did not know how long it would take to kill her. It varied.

  Each day he would arrive at the hospital to the sounds of sirens and gunfire outside and each night he would leave to the same. Inside it was relatively quiet unless one of them awoke and that only lasted a little while until they administered the lethal injection. Then it was quiet again and he could talk to her.

  He would tell her stories she had heard many times but which he knew she would not mind his telling again. About his mother sending him out with a nickel to buy blocks of ice from the iceman on Stuyvesant Avenue. About playing pool with Jackie Gleason in a down-neck Newark pool hall just before the war and almost beating him. About the time he was out with his first-wife-to-be and his father-in-law-to-be sitting in a bar together and somebody insulted her and he took a swing at the guy but the guy had ducked and he pasted his future father-in-law instead.

  He would urge her not to die. To try to come back to him.

  He would ask her to remember their wedding day and how their friends were there and how the sun was shining.

  He brought flowers until he could no longer stand the scent of them. He bought mylar balloons from the gift shop that said get well get well soon and tied them to the same bed she was tied to.

  Days passed with a numbing regularity. He saw many more horrible things. He knew that she was lingering far longer than most did. The hospital guards all knew him at the door by now and did not even bother to ask him for a pass anymore.

  “Four eighteen B,” he would say but probably even that wasn’t necessary.

  Nights he’d go home to a boarded-up mobile home in an increasingly deserted Village, put a frozen dinner into the microwave and watch the evening news—it was all news now, ever since the dead started rising—and when it was over he’d go to bed. No friends came by. Many of his friends were themselves dead. He didn’t encourage the living.

  Then one morning she was gone.

  Every trace of her.

  The flowers were gone, the balloons, her clothing—everything. The doctors told him that she had died during the night but that as of course he must have noticed by now, they had this down pretty much to a science and a humane one at that, that once she’d come back again it had been very quick and she hadn’t suffered.

  If he wanted he could sit there for a while, the doctor said. Or there was a grief counselor who could certainly be made available to him.

  He sat.

  In an hour they wheeled in a pasty-faced redhead perhaps ten years younger than Will with what was obviously a nasty bite out of her left cheek just above the lip. A kiss, perhaps, gone awry. The nurses did not seem to notice him there. Or if they did they ignored him. He sat and watched the redhead sleep in his dead wife’s bed.

  In the morning he came by to visit.

  He told the guard four eighteen B.

  He sat in the chair and told her the story about playing pool with Gleason, how he’d sunk his goddamn cue ball going after the eight, and about buying rotten hamburger during the Great Depression and his first wife crying well into the night over a pound of spoiled meat. He told her the old joke about the rooster in the hen yard. He spoke softly about friends and relations, long dead. He went down to the gift shop and bought her a card and a small potted plant for the window next to the bed.

  Two days later she was gone. The card and potted plant were gone too and her drawer and closet were empty.

  The man who lay there in her bed was about Will’s age and roughly the same height and build and he had lost an eye and an ear along with his thumb, index and middle fingers of his hand, all on the right side of his body. He had a habit of lying slightly to his left as though to turn away from what the dead had done to him.

  Something about the man made Will think he was a sailor, some rough weathered texture to his face or perhaps the fierce bushy eyebrows and the grizzled white stubble of beard. Will had never sailed himself but he had always wanted to. He told the man about his summers as a boy at Asbury Park and Point Pleasant down at the Jersey shore, nights on the boardwalk and days with his family by the sea. It was the closest thing he could think of that the man might possibly relate to.

  The man lasted just a single night.

  Two more came and went—a middle-aged woman and a pretty teenage girl.

  He did not know what to say to the girl. It had been years since he had even spoken to a person who was still in her teens—unless you could count the cashiers at the market. So he sat and hummed to himself and read to her out of a four-month-old copy of People magazine.

  He bought her daisies and a small stuffed teddy bear and placed the bear next to her on the bed.

  The girl was the first to die and then come back in his presence.

  He was surprised that it startled him so little. One moment the girl was sleeping and the next she was struggling against the straps which bound her to the bed, the thick grey-yellow mucus flowing from her mouth and nose spraying the sheets they had wrapped around her tight. There was a sound in her throat like the burning of dry lea
ves.

  Will pushed his chair back toward the wall and watched her. He had the feeling there was nothing he could say to her.

  On the wall above a small red monitor light was blinking on and off. Presumably a similar light was blinking at the nurses’ station because within seconds a nurse, a doctor and a male attendant were all in the room and the attendant was holding her head while the doctor administered the injection through her nostril far up into the brain. The girl shuddered once and then seemed to wilt and slide deep down into the bed. The stuffed bear tumbled to the floor.

  The doctor turned to Will.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That you had to see this.”

  Will nodded. The doctor took him for a relative.

  Will didn’t mind.

  They pulled the sheet up over her and glanced at him a moment longer and then walked out through the doorway.

  He got up and followed. He took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked past the guard to the parking lot. He could hear automatic weapons-fire from the WalMart down the block. He got into his car and drove home.

  After dinner he had trouble breathing so he took a little oxygen and went to bed early. He felt a lot better in the morning.

  Two more died. Both of them at night. Passed like ghosts from his life.

  The second to die in front of him was a hospital attendant. Will had seen him many times. A young fellow, slightly balding. Evidently he’d been bitten while a doctor administered the usual injection because the webbing of his hand was bandaged and suppurating slightly.

  The attendant did not go easily. He was a young man with a thick muscular neck and he thrashed and shook the bed.

  The third to die in front of him was the woman who looked so much like Bea. Who had her hair and eyes and general build and coloring.

  He watched them put her down and thought, this was what it was like. Her face would have looked this way. Her body would have done that.

  On the morning after she died and rose and died again he was walking past the first-floor guard, a soft little heavy-set man who had known him by sight for what must have been a while now. “Four eighteen B,” he said.

  The guard looked at him oddly.

  Perhaps it was because he was crying. The crying had gone on all night or most of it and here it was morning and he was crying once again. He felt tired and a little foolish. His breathing was bad.

  He pretended that all was well as usual and smiled at the guard and sniffed the bouquet of flowers he’d picked from his garden.

  The guard did not return the smile. He noticed that the man’s eyes were red-rimmed too and felt a moment of alarm because he seemed to sense that the eyes were not red as his were simply from too much crying. But you had to walk past the man to get inside so that was what he did.

  The guard clutched his arm with his little white sausage fingers and bit at the stringy bicep just below the sleeve of Will’s shortsleeved shirt. There was no one in the hall ahead of him by the elevators, no one to help him.

  He kicked the man in the shin and felt dead skin rip beneath his shoe and wrenched his arm away. Inside his chest he felt a kind of snapping as though someone had snapped a twig inside him.

  Heartbreak?

  He pushed the guard straight-arm just as he had pushed John Blount so long ago and although there were no stairs this time there was a fire extinguisher on the wall and the guard’s head hit it with a large clanging sound and he slid stunned down the face of the wall.

  Will walked to the elevator and punched four. He concentrated on his breathing and wondered if they would be willing to give him oxygen if he asked them for it.

  He walked into the room and stared.

  The bed was empty.

  It had never been empty. Not once in all the times he’d visited.

  It was a busy hospital.

  That the bed was empty this morning was almost confusing to him. As though he had fallen down a rabbit-hole.

  Still he knew it wasn’t wise to argue when after all this time one finally had a stroke of luck.

  He put the slightly battered flowers from his garden in a waterglass. He drew water in the bathroom sink. He undressed quietly and found an open-backed hospital gown hanging in the closet and slipped it on over his mottled shoulders and climbed into bed between clean fresh-smelling sheets. The bite did not hurt much and there was just a little blood.

  He waited for the nurse to arrive on her morning rounds.

  He thought how everything was the same, really. How nothing much had changed whether the dead were walking or not. There were those who lived inside of life and those who for whatever reason did not or could not. Dead or no dead.

  He waited for them to come and sedate him and strap him down and wished only that he had somebody to talk to—to tell the Gleason story, maybe, one last time. Gleason was a funny man in person just as he was on TV but with a foul nasty mouth on him, always cussing, and he had almost beat him.

  Snakes

  What she came to think of as her snake appeared just after the first storm.

  She was talking on the phone with her lawyer in New York. Outside the floodwaters had receded. She could see through the screen which enclosed the lanai on one side, that her yard, which an hour before had been under a foot of water, had drained off down the slope past the picket fence and into the canal beyond.

  She could let out the dog, she thought. Though she’d have to watch her. At one year old the golden retriever was still a puppy and liked to dig. Ann had learned the hard way. Weather in south Florida being what it was she’d already gone through three slipcovers for the couch due to black tarry mud carried in on Katie’s feet and belly.

  The lawyer was saying he needed money.

  “I hate to ask,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Two thousand for starters.”

  “Christ, Ray.”

  “I know it’s tough. But you’ve got to look at it this way—he’s already into you for over thirty grand and every month the figure keeps growing. If we get him he’ll owe you my fee as well. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “If we get him.”

  “You can’t think that way, Annie. I know you’re starving out there. I know what you make for a living and I know why you moved down there in the first place—because it was the cheapest place you could think of where you could still manage to bring your kid up in any kind of decent fashion. That’s his fault. You’ve got to go after him. Just think about it for a minute. Thirty grand in back child support! Believe me, it will change your life. You can’t afford to be defeatist about this.”

  “Ray, I feel defeated. I feel like he’s beaten the shit out of me.”

  “You’re not. Not yet.”

  She sighed. She felt seventy—not forty. She could feel it in her legs. She sat down on the couch next to Katie. Pushed gently away at the cold wet nose that nuzzled her face.

  “Find the retainer, Ann.”

  “Where?”

  I’m trapped, she thought. He’s got me. I barely made taxes this year.

  “Trust me. Find the money:”

  She hung up and opened the sliding glass door to the lanai and then stood in the open screen doorway to the yard and watched while Katie sniffed through the scruffy grass and behind the hibiscus looking for a suitable place to pee. The sun was bright. The earth was steaming.

  She couldn’t even afford her dog, she thought. She loved the dog and so did Danny but the dog was a luxury, her collar, her chain. Her shots were an extravagance.

  I’m trapped.

  Outside Katie stiffened.

  Her feet splayed wide and her nose darted down low to the ground, darted up and then down again. The smooth golden hair along her backbone suddenly seemed to coarsen.

  “Katie?”

  The dog barely glanced at her, but the glance told her that whatever she saw in the grass, Katie was going play with it come hell or high water. The eyes were bright. Her haunches trembled with ex
citement.

  Katie’s play, she knew, could sometimes be lethal. Ann would find chewed bodies of ginkos on the lanai deposited there in front of the door like some sort of present. Once, a small rabbit. She watched amazed and shocked one sunny afternoon as the dog leapt four feet straight up into the air to pluck a sparrow from its flight. She was thinking this.

  And then she saw the snake.

  It was nose to nose with Katie, the two of them fencing back and forth not a foot apart, the snake banded black and brown, half-hidden behind the hibiscus bushes, but from where she stood, six feet away, it looked frighteningly big. Definitely big enough, she thought, whether it was poisonous or not, to do serious damage if it was the snake and not Katie who did the biting.

  She heard it hiss. Saw its mouth drop open on the hinged jaw.

  It darted, struck, and fell into the black mud at Katie’s feet. The dog had shifted stance and backed away and was still backpedaling but the snake was not letting it go at that. The snake was advancing.

  “Katie!”

  She ran out. Her eyes never left the snake for an instant. She registered its fast smooth glide, registered for the first time actual size of the thing.

  Seven feet? Eight feet? Jesus!

  She crossed the distance to the dog faster than she thought she’d ever moved in her life, grabbed her collar and flung all seventy-five pounds of golden retriever head-first past her toward the door so that it was behind her now, shit, head raised, gliding through the mud and tufts of grass coming toward her as she stumbled over the dog who’d turned in the doorway for one last look at the thing and then got past her and slammed the screen in the goddamn face of the thing just as it hit the screen once and then twice—a sound like a foot or a hammer striking—hit it hard enough to dent it inward. And finally, seeing that, she screamed.

  The dog was barking now, going for the screen on their side, enraged by the attempted intrusion. Ann hauled her away by the collar back through the lanai and slid the glass doors shut and even though she knew it was crazy, even though she knew the snake could not get through the screen, she damn well locked them.