“Where’s that at?”
“Once we’re in the city, keep on Nirvana Avenue. You can’t miss it.”
At that moment, I heard cawing. I looked to my left. In the open fields were piles of rotting corpses. And crows, swooping down and eating the dead flesh from the stacks of stiffs. The sky was darkening, because there were so many of the carnivorous scavengers flying around.
“Those are the Shedding Fields,” Trash said, not looking up, lost in his woodgrain.
“The what?”
“Shedding Fields. The Land of the Dead is just a waiting station for the dead, a place to get us ready for the ultimate afterlife. When we’re finally ready to leave the illusion of flesh, we shed our skins and bones and move on.”
“Heaven? Hell?”
“Whatever.”
The illusion of flesh? So all the corpses in the Land of the Dead only thought they had bodies? By that token, Frank only thought he had cancer.
But then, maybe the same thing went for the Land of the Living. Maybe flesh was just an illusion there, too.
Apparently some illusions could be pretty tenacious.
Then I saw something equally disturbing. At first it looked like a lake of burning oil. Soon I realized it was blood. Flaming blood. Zombies were walking into the lake and kept walking until they were submerged in the boiling scarlet gore.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Baptism of Fire,” Trash said. “Some of them do that before they shed their skins. A religious ritual, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. And I didn’t care to know, either. I had to switch to a lighter topic. “What are you whittling?”
“Kali. A bloodthirsty Hindu deity. She’s known for drinking blood and tossing human heads. Four arms, fangs—a real nasty bitch of a goddess.”
“Charming.”
Above on the telephone lines, three corpses were hanging, tangled in their own unspooled intestines, the bodies rocking back and forth like flaccid puppets at a desolated marionette show. I was suddenly overcome with dread. I felt I was never going to leave the Land of the Dead. I was stuck between a rock and a dead place. I knew I’d be here until I was only naked bones, and those, too, would crumble.
Stay calm, I told myself. Just keep talking.
“So, how’d you die?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
Trash stopped cutting the wood and stuck his knife into the dashboard. “Funny story. I was homeless and living in a cardboard box by the Hudson River. One night, this gang of punks poured gasoline all over me and set me on fire. They wanted to see if bums could burn.”
“But . . . that’s terrible. What’s so funny?” I said.
Trash cackled. “My saying it was a funny story is the funny part. Get it?”
“Yeah. Actually, I do.”
“That was a long time ago. I think. There’s no time here. Minutes, hours, days, and nights all merge together. Time is a measuring device for the living to keep track of how much longer they are going to be alive. Our time is up, like a busted parking meter.”
Finally I was in the city, and I found myself at an intersection. Nirvana Avenue turned out to be the road I was on, and Deacon Boulevard crossed it.
“Keep on Nirvana. The diner is two blocks ahead.” Trash took the knife from the dashboard and continued whittling. Pieces of wood flaked and flew as he chipped at the block.
The road turned into a cobblestone street, like something out of the horse-and-carriage days. The shocks weren’t in the best shape, and we were being shaken more than a vodka martini for 007.
We came across a fifties-style drive-in diner. Neon lights, speakers to place an order. Something straight out of American Graffiti. I saw a bunch of zombies in wrecked muscle cars and crunched-up motorcycles. A zombie lady twirled a hula hoop around her raw-meat hips.
“This is the Diner of the Dead,” Trash said, as if I hadn’t guessed already.
I parked the Ratmobile in an empty spot near the back.
The diner had a giant sign with the food and prices painted on it. The place would have been perfectly nostalgic had it not been for the cadavers and its location next to a toxic waste site. Black metal drums with yellow checkers and skull symbols were definitely not fifties icons. Green and yellow ooze leaked from huge stacks of the deadly cylinders.
But then, what was a little more death in a place like this?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DINER OF THE DEAD
I spotted Fiona right away. She was roller-skating around, taking orders in her pink satin short shorts, pink halter top, and pink paper hat. All that pink clashed with her blue skin.
And what were the zombies feasting on? Blood sodas? Fried intestines? Chilled brains? Nope. Just burgers with extra bacon and cheese, greasy fries, and milk shakes. Enough cholesterol to kill them, if they weren’t already dead.
“Hey, boys,” Fiona said, “today’s special is . . .” Then she saw it was me. But it really wasn’t me, because I was in Frank’s body. Her complexion became a shade more pale, more like periwinkle than her usual cobalt self. She stared into my eyes. “Frank? Jeremy? Both? Who’s in there now?”
“Just me, Jeremy,” I said. “Frank has my body now. This is Trash.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Trash said.
“All bad, I hope,” she said with a crooked grin. “What would you like to order?”
“A bacon-and-cheese chicken sandwich, onion rings, and a chocolate malt,” I said.
“Nothing,” Trash said. “I already ate at the junkyard.”
About ten minutes later, Fiona returned with my order on a red plastic tray. “Four bucks,” she said.
I handed her a five. “Keep the change. We’re trying to find Frank and my old body. Want to help us?”
She was chewing gum and spit the big pink wad onto the pavement. “Sure. I was getting sick of this waitress gig, anyway. Being dead is bad enough without having to wait on people. Give me a minute to go tell my boss to fuck himself. I’ll be right back.”
I had finished the meal and Fiona still hadn’t returned. Another carhop, a short, busty, red-haired girl with a bullet hole in her chest, took the empty tray.
About five minutes later, Fiona returned sans skates, replaced with running shoes. She jumped into the backseat,
“Any idea where Frank might be?” I asked.
Fiona shrugged. “Maybe the rodeo.”
“The rodeo?”
“The Day of the Dead Annual Rodeo,” she said.
“Cheap beer and bulls horning cowboys. Loads of fun,” Trash said with a sneer. “I don’t think he’s there. I think he’d be at The Pits.”
“The Pits?” I asked.
“The Spider Pits. They’re infested with thousands of tarantulas that crawl all over you.”
“Why would anyone go there?” I asked.
“Spider bites induce hallucinations better than magic mushrooms and LSD combined,” Trash piped up.
“He wouldn’t be there,” Fiona said. “You kidding? He’s not going to risk killing off his shiny new living body.”
“Then the rodeo it is,” I said. “How do I get there?”
“Get on Nirvana Avenue and turn onto Afterlife Drive,” Fiona said. “You have to drive through The Flats. It’s after that.”
“The Flats?”
Fiona and Trash said in unison, “Don’t ask.”
I started the Ratmobile, pulled out of the drive-in, and kept going straight down Nirvana Avenue.
The red raindrops started falling again.
“Lovely day,” Fiona said with a cheery smile. She was acting like a flirtatious Morticia Addams on crack.
“For what? A funeral?”
Soon I realized we were heading out of the downtown area of the metal necropolis. Most of the structures were burned or blackened husks of buildings, scattered through oily fields of dead grass.
“The road ahead is Afterlife Drive,” Fiona said.
I took the turn. Dr
ive was too urban a term to describe the street. Gravel road was more accurate.
The police car rattled along like a pissed-off sidewinder. We drove by a flooded graveyard. A sign sticking out of the red waters proclaimed it to be Tranquility Cemetery. Only the tops of tombstones were visible, and in the middle of this submerged boneyard, a little boy in a tuxedo hopped from stone to stone. It took me a moment to realize he was trying to escape from a huge eel-like thing wriggling through the water after him.
Up the road a little farther, an old man was fishing in this cemetery swamp. He cast us an evil eye. I guess he figured our rattling transportation would scare away the fish, if indeed that was what he was after.
“I thought people shed their skins when they left this place. So why a cemetery?” I asked.
“Some dead people don’t like wandering around like this,” Trash explained. “They’re traditionalists. They insist on being stuck into boxes. So into the boxes they go. They’re all still awake down there. Must get pretty boring.”
Finally, after rattling for what seemed like a decade through that rural expanse, we were back on a real road, no gravel, no bricks, no cobblestone. Just old-fashioned concrete.
We drove through a dark wooded area. The trees were all burned black, leafless, and smoldering. This was what the remains of a forest fire must look like.
“The Flats,” Trash said. “Be careful.”
I heard something strike the back of the Ratmobile, like someone had thrown a baseball at us. Then I heard the sound again. And again. And again and again and again.
Those weren’t baseballs hitting the car; they were bats. They were flapping all around us, and soon the swarm was so dense, I couldn’t see.
I flipped on my headlights, and the bats started screeching. I honked the horn. This caused the bats to fly into the police car like savage miniature dive-bombers. Everything I did seemed to enrage them, so I decided the best course of action would be to do nothing.
I stopped the car and turned off the lights.
“That’s the ticket,” Fiona whispered. “Play dead.”
The bats slowed down their assault. Perhaps they figured that they’d won and their opponent was down for the count.
In a few minutes, they all flew off.
We continued on our way, and soon we came across something that looked like an abandoned football stadium. A few dozen banged-up pickups rusted away in the parking lot, which had rotten, bug-riddled hay bales for aisle markers.
“The rodeo?” I asked.
“Sure is,” Fiona said. “Frank loves a good rodeo. Let’s see if he’s here.”
I pulled the police car into a parking spot and got out with Fiona and Trash walking next to me, one on each side.
There were only a couple dozen cadaver spectators. The audience was indeed dead. In the dirt field, a skeleton cowboy rode a bull. The beast was covered with bloody gashes. He must have ended up here after losing a bullfight.
The bull bucked the cowboy off as easily as a linebacker brushing a flake of dandruff off his shoulder pad. The mighty bull then charged him, shattering every bone. It was like the cowboy had been hit by a speeding car, without even the protection of flesh.
The pathetic audience didn’t bother to cheer or clap. The rodeo, like many of the more dangerous sports—skiing, car racing, skydiving—usually featured the possibility of death hovering in the air like a crazed vulture. But when you’re already dead, death isn’t that exciting.
A rodeo clown skeleton chased the bull with a hot poker until the bloody creature ran into an empty pen.
The clown slammed the pen gate shut and trudged off. He glanced my way and flashed his rictus grin at me. His skull was slathered with greasepaint—cherry-red streaks for lips, rosy pink circles on the cheekbones, sky blue eye shadow smeared into the eye sockets. Lovely.
I scanned the crowd. No Frank. But in the third row from the bottom, I saw Garth. He sat drinking a bottle of beer, wearing a stained, torn T-shirt, dirty jeans, boots, and a straw hat. He saw us and waved.
We walked down the aisle to meet him.
“So. Frank got your body, huh?” he said.
“How’d you know I wasn’t Frank?” I asked. “You guys have a newsletter going around or what?”
He shrugged. “That’s Frank’s body but those ain’t his eyes. He killed me, you know. A man never forgets the eyes of his murderer.” He took a swig of beer, followed by a pinch of tobacco. He chewed it for a few seconds, then spit the black tobacco remains onto the ground. “I guess you’re all looking for him, huh? Did you check The Pits?”
“He’s got a living body now,” Fiona said. “He’s not going to do anything to kill it off. I went through this same discussion with Trash. This is Trash, by the way. Trash, this is Garth.”
Garth and Trash shook hands. It was good to see that even the dead observed some social niceties.
“Then I bet Frank’s at Purgatory,” Garth said.
“Purgatory?”
“A nightclub,” Fiona said with a smile. “Hottest spot in the Land of the Dead.”
“That’s the first place I’d check. Frank always goes there,” Garth said. “What’s the game plan? You think you’re going to make him give you your body?”
“I’ve got to give it my best shot,” I said. “You want to help? Maybe get back at him for . . . well, for killing you?”
“I’m sort of in the middle of something.”
“Oh.”
“Nah, I’m just yanking your chain.” Garth finished his beer and flung the bottle into the field, where it crashed against the clown skeleton’s skull. “Oops. We’d better get going. Right now.”
“What’s the big idea?” the clown shrieked. He stomped his big clown feet on the ground. “Wake up, sleepyheads. We’ve got some wise guys up here.”
More clown zombies started popping up from the ground, where apparently they’d been taking refreshing dirt naps. Most had more meat on their bones than their outraged colleague.
Fuck. More clowns.
Like I wasn’t sick enough of clowns already.
But then, that’s the thing about clowns, isn’t it? They’re relentless. Rain or shine, day or night, living or dead, clowns keep on peddling their goofy-ass wares. They’re cheery juggernauts. Living embodiments of eccentricity at its best—or insanity at its worst.
We all fled to the Ratmobile and got in. Already the car was covered in a thick layer of dust.
I asked, “How do you get to this Purgatory place?”
“Follow the bloody brick road,” Garth said in a low voice.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.
Garth yawned. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
In a way, his paraphrase of The Wizard of Oz quote seemed appropriate. We had Fiona for Dorothy, Trash for the Tin Man, and Garth wearing a straw hat for a noseless Scarecrow.
So what did that make me? The Cowardly Lion? At that moment, it seemed perfectly suitable, because I was scared shitless. I glanced in the rearview mirror, and a horde of rodeo clown skeletons was heading straight for us, kind of like the winged monkeys of the Wicked Witch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
PURGATORY
That Wizard-of-Oz-from-hell idea kept haunting me as I drove the Ratmobile, trying to get away from the clowns chasing us. They ran pretty damn fast for dead folks with floppy shoes, but eventually I lost sight of them.
So, was Frank the Wizard? Or was he the Wicked Witch? Whatever the case, once I found him, maybe I could return to Kansas. Or rather, Texas. Anywhere but locked within this never-ending nightmare.
“Get back on Afterlife Drive,” Garth said, “then turn onto Bloodstone Road. That takes you into the city.”
I followed Garth’s directions, and soon we were heading into a different necropolis. Every skyscraper here was burned or bombed, a hollow shell. That was how Chicago probably looked after the great fire or maybe Hiroshima after the atom bomb. A destruction zone filled with
steel-ribbed husks and charred remains.
And rats, hordes of rats. Not the robotic type but real ones. The streets were flooded with them. Rats here, rats there, rats everywhere. We could hear the dirty varmints crunching under the tires as we drove down the streets.
We were surrounded by row after row of tall buildings, blocking out most of the light from above. We drove around abandoned vehicles and tried not to hit the zombie pedestrians walking aimlessly amidst the rats. All the zombies had hungry rats hanging off their limbs, feeding off their wandering victims.
Suddenly I heard shouting from behind the car. I looked in the rearview mirror; the clowns were back on our tail. Our slow driving through the abandoned cars had given them a chance to catch up with us.
Fortunately, the rats were still plenty hungry, and another glance in the rearview mirror showed that the clowns were now busy trying to fight off the legions of rats that swarmed over them. Those clowns were pretty colorful. The rats probably took one look and saw a walking candy store.
We drove in silence. The city had that effect on you. I was afraid to speak, as though the city actually had ears and if I said an unkind word about her, she would swallow me whole, and I would be forever lost in the junkyard tangle of her dead guts.
Garth smoked a cigarette, staring blankly out a side window. Trash whittled his block of wood, and Fiona applied her red lipstick.
“How far is this Purgatory?” I asked.
“A few more blocks,” Garth said. “There’s a neon sign outside the place, the only one that still works in this shit hole of a city. You can’t miss it.”
On a nearby corner, a motorcycle gang was hanging out near a tattoo parlor. The five riders stood by their bikes, talking, and kept the rats away by swinging chains at them. The backs of their jackets depicted the Reaper decapitating a man with a sickle. One of the zombie bikers sneered at me.
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