Pariah

by Bob Fingerman

  Books.

  Let’s do this.

  Let’s do this.

  “I need to hit the bookstore.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yeah. Abe said he wanted some books to better himself. Yeah. That’s something, a man his age. I guess that’s kind of admirable. ’Course he could just be bored, but still.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I need some further scriptural reading, too. To maybe find some answers.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You really never encountered any other survivors during your travels?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s so weird. You ever try calling out? Seeing if maybe you got any response?”

  “Nope.”

  She might be lying. If she were a demon it would be her duty to lie, to please her unholy master. Karl cleared his throat, then hollered, “Is anyone out there?” as loud as possible. He repeated it a couple of times but the only reply was increased agitation in the zombies that flanked them. Mona punched Karl on the bicep and squinted.

  “Don’t,” Mona said. “Riles ’em.”

  “It’s just, if there was anyone out there I . . .”

  “Just don’t.”

  “Okay. Sorry. I was just . . . Sorry.”

  On they trudged, the zombies hanging back, frustrated. The experiment so far was a success. Karl hadn’t been eaten. Big success. Huge. This could change everything. As they neared First Avenue, Karl felt buoyed by their progress. The sun no longer felt amplified, it felt invigorating. His leg muscles felt purposeful. He looked up at the sky, which was clear and blue, and felt glorified. He felt closer to God than he had in ages. Or at least fonder. Midway between First and Second, the shrink-wrap around Karl’s midriff burst and pinkish brine splashed the pavement. Mona whipped her head around, startled by the wet sound. She stared at the puddle at Karl’s feet.

  “Your water just break?”

  Mona cracking a joke was almost as alarming as the amplified interest the zombies displayed. The scent of his natural soup was like sounding the dinner gong. Though they hung back, their rancor was heightened. The sounds emanating from their cracked, broken faces threatened to void Karl’s colon.

  “Oh God. Oh Jesus,” he whimpered. He wanted to drop to his knees and pray.

  “Keep moving.”

  With stinging liquid dripping from his back, Karl followed Mona’s edict. The trip back to the building now seemed like miles rather than a couple of blocks. Long blocks. Avenue blocks, which were at least double the length of north-south ones. Abe and his books. Abe. What had Abe ever done for him? What was he thinking, volunteering for this madness?

  Volunteering?

  He’d suggested it.

  Karl wanted to strangle himself.

  Don’t blame Abe. You wanted that pill book. You did. Blame yourself.

  “Get the fuck offa me!” Alan shrilled, swatting away Abe’s palsied hands.

  Abe moaned from the pits of his collapsed lungs, pushing up plumes of stale, mucus-scented reek. This wasn’t what Alan had expected when he came a-knockin’ on Abe’s door. Ever since Ruth’s demise, Alan felt bad for the old guy, up here all alone. But this was bullshit. At first, once he’d gotten Abe’s door open, he’d thought the old man was just disoriented, the way he was bumping up against the windowsill. Maybe too much Valium. But once Abe had turned around Alan knew he’d joined the ranks of the undead. And now here he was, wrestling with a zombified oldster in a fusty apartment that smelled of mothballs and something worse.

  Alan managed to knock Abe to the ground, upon which he heard Abe’s hip splinter. Abe grasped at Alan, but like the old commercial, he’d fallen and couldn’t get up. Alan felt queasy. This wasn’t comfortably impersonal like his relationship to the things below. This was Abe. Abraham Fogelhut, bearing out the cliché that when one half of an elderly couple perishes the other usually follows in close order—only now they came back. Alan scanned the room, looking for something to put Abe out of his misery, but saw nothing obvious. With Abe scraping brittle nails against the grain of the rug, trying to rise and failing, Alan reached the door, stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him. He felt pretty certain Abe wouldn’t be mastering the doorknob, let alone getting himself up and about any time soon. Alan gulped some deep breaths, smoothed the front of his shirt, and then headed down to let the others know about Abe’s condition.

  36

  “It gets merrier and merrier around here,” Ellen said, sourness sliming off her tongue. “So what do we do?”

  “We have to get rid of him, obviously.”

  “It’s come to this. Evicting our senior citizens,” Ellen said, her wryness not abating.

  “Well, yeah,” Alan agreed.

  “Ugh. The peachiness of this whole situation is really beginning to wear on me, you know? You die, you come back as one of those. Delightful. Being alive is just the next step to being undead. You think anyone just stays dead any more? Or is that passé?”

  Alan shrugged.

  “Some must stay dead,” Ellen continued. “They must. I mean it’s not like there’s eight million zombies out there. The streets are packed, but not that packed. But maybe they are. Like I know anything. There are probably apartments all over the city packed with zombies too stupid to let themselves out. Fuck. I thought I knew where we stood on this but we don’t know anything. I thought it was rat bites or poison gas or some communicable germ or whatever, but it’s just how it is now. We come back. Awesome.” Ellen took a sip of tepid herbal tea and repositioned her hair clip. “This tea is supposed to calm the nerves.” She let out a derisory laugh. “So whattaya think? Is Karl doing great or does Mona return a solo act?”

  “Um.”

  “Yeah, well, if Mona makes it back—and I see no reason to doubt she will unless Karl’s managed to fuck up her good thing—she’s bringing me a little something special to take care of our situation. So, maybe I’m a little edgy. Just a little. A tad.”

  “What situation?”

  “Don’t be fucking obtuse, Alan. The baby.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, ‘oh.’ It’s the kind of situation that merits that kind of response. And don’t worry. I don’t hate you. You’re right. When you’re right you’re right and you’ve been right all along to think having this baby was wrong. It’s wrong. So today I make it right and take care of it. It’ll be taken care of.”

  Alan let out a long breath, half relief, half sympathy, half something else. That was one too many halves, but the sigh was full of subdued emotion. He didn’t know what to do. Pat her on the back? Give her a hug? He stepped over and extended his arms for the latter, but Ellen made no effort to accept the embrace.

  “This isn’t a huggy moment,” Ellen said, voice flat. “It is what it is, and all without the hassle of pro-lifers to complicate things. That’s pretty all right. I call that progress. Whattaya think the pro-lifers’ stance on aborting a fetus in a dead world would be? Would that still be so bad? Not that it matters, but we’re making conversation while we put off Abe’s expulsion from the building. I’m ragging on you. Don’t give me that look. He has to go. Neighbors who will eat their fellow neighbors are not to be permitted. I think that’s in the charter. What? What’s that look?”

  Alan wasn’t aware of what look he wore, but he felt completely flummoxed.

  “No look,” he said, his voice soft with apprehension. “No look. Just my face.”

  “If you say so. So, maybe one horror show will take my mind off what’s on my mind, if you follow. You wanna go deal with Abe and toss him or what? I’m game if you are. I could use the exercise.”

  Alan fidgeted for a moment, chewing his lip till he drew blood. The coppery taste was unpleasant. Abe was one of their own. But Ellen was right: no zombies allowed. Eddie would probably relish a go, what with some of Abe’s previous remarks at his expense, but Abe deserved better. He deserved to be put to final rest with some kindness. Some dignity, if such a thing was
now possible.

  “Sure. Let’s get it over with.”

  “He’s feisty for a dead man with a busted hip,” Ellen observed as she forced Abe’s head down with a mop, the spongy pad pressed hard against the old man’s windpipe. Abe’s arms flailed impotently at his attackers.

  “Maybe we should get the others,” Alan suggested, having second thoughts. “Eddie would . . .”

  “No Eddie. We don’t need that throwback to help us.”

  Alan looked at Abe. It wasn’t Abe any more, but it was. It still looked like Abe. He wasn’t some rotting thing. Not yet, anyway. His eyes weren’t glazed over and remote; there was rage in those undead orbs. Rage and confusion. Abe caught Ellen’s pants cuff in his spastic fingers and tugged, pulling her low riders a bit lower, exposing the elastic of her thong.

  “Uh-uh-uh, you dirty old man,” Ellen scolded, but the humor was gone. This wasn’t funny, even in the sickest way. She pushed the mop harder into Fogelhut’s throat, the pressure precipitating a volley of excruciatingly thick, wet sounds of strangulation and cartilage being demolished. Alan fought the urge to retch or pass out and grabbed a large towel from the bathroom, which he quickly threw over Abe’s face, partly to muzzle him, partly to mask him. Alan didn’t want to see that mechanical simulation of life. With the towel firmly secured over the old man’s face, Ellen released the mop. Alan blinked away tears. This was so not right. Abe had probably slipped away into a peaceful, Valium-smoothed death, yet here he was, snapping at them. Abe rocked back and forth, his legs useless. That broken hip had hobbled him. He wouldn’t even be able to shamble around out there.

  “Keep the towel over his face,” Alan snapped. “And sit on his chest. Something to keep him still.”

  “What? Aren’t we going to toss him?”

  “We are. But in a minute. Hold his arms.”

  On the floor Abe undulated, the towel tied firmly over his whole head. He looked like a hostage, crippled and hooded. Alan looked around the room, then spotted a large burnt-orange alabaster ashtray. As he hefted it, feeling its substantial weight and solidity, he remembered his own mom had one similar back when he was a kid.

  Alan stalked over to Abe’s wiggling recumbent form, lofted the ashtray in a high arc, then brought it down hard on the old man’s skull, pulverizing it. The sound, muffled though it may have been, was sickening, but to make sure, Alan repeated the motion five times until there was only crunchy pulp beneath the soaked terry cloth. Ellen edged back, mouth hanging open, her bout of grim wit quelled by Alan’s benevolent savagery.

  Without asking for her assistance, Alan lifted the inert body, walked it over to the window and dropped it out. He stared as Abe’s body rested for a moment on the surface of the crowd below like a body surfer in a mosh pit, before it was absorbed, the new addition sinking to the pavement, lost, soon to be trampled into paste.

  No eulogy.

  Nothing.

  Ellen let some tears escape, not even sure who or what they were for.

  Alan offered no comfort.

  They both retreated to their respective apartments and closed the doors.

  And Eddie caught a big one on the roof.

  Three rooftops away from the hump angling, Dabney stubbed out his umpteenth chain-smoked cigarette. Eyes watery and throat scorched from the combination of butts and booze he’d been consuming since Karl and Mona debarked, Dabney divided his fogged attention between the idiot antics of the meatheads and periodically looking for any sign of their return. He didn’t know how long it had been since they left. His watch had died.

  Eddie had certainly gotten his recreational sadism down tight. The big greaseball would catch one and reel it in with almost no effort, then go to town on it with his trusty box of tools. Wrenches, hammers, pliers—the works. Did it count as torture if the victims weren’t strictly human or strictly alive? Dabney could imagine congressional hearings on that subject. The freckly mick, Dave, at one point had been cheerleader, spending time offsides shouting halfhearted variations on “Rah-rah, go team go!” Pathetic. But lately he just sat on the wall, head in his hands, brooding, watching his buddy.

  Dabney jiggled the bottle by the neck, listening to the liquid slosh around. The bottle had been mostly full when the two had left. Now it was more than half gone. Either Dabney had gone through it fast or it had been a while. He looked over at the other roof. Three dismembered zombies lay in a heap. Catches of the day. Funny way to gauge the passage of time without a timepiece, Dabney mused, too drunk to take into account the position of the sun or other such time-honored pre-Swiss Quartz movement methods. He should have asked Karl to pick up a fresh battery.

  Karl.

  Would that naïve cracker make it home in one piece? Karl was a poor substitute for his own dead offspring, but Dabney’d made him his surrogate son and he hated the thought of losing him. He remembered ruffling Karl’s oily hair. Such a small thing, but he wanted to do it again. When Karl made it back he’d palm that boy’s head and mess that hair up good. And now that he’d been bathed a bit, it might even be like white-boy hair ought to be: dry and strawlike, like he imagined Opie’s would be. The thought made him smile until his brain converted “when” to “if.”

  “God dammit.”

  He tossed the bottle off the roof and, too loaded to go downstairs, tottered to his lean-to sleep it off.

  Eddie yanked the last tooth from his catch’s mouth and flicked it from the pliers’ jaws onto the pile he’d made. He wore a necklace of ears around his tanned neck, having copped the idea from some ’Nam movie he’d seen. He reached over and retrieved a hacksaw from the box and commenced removing the forearm of the struggling wretch beneath his knees. Eddie hoped they felt pain. They made sounds like they did. Sweat dripped off his bare shoulders, the bandana stretched across his forehead keeping his eyes perspiration-free.

  “Yeah, like buttah,” he grinned, as the blade sliced through the skin and muscle straight to the bone, then right on through that. These things were seriously malnourished. Sometimes their flesh fell away like well-cooked ribs, not that he had any appetite to try zombie meat. Certainly not since the Mona gravy train rolled in. But it was uncanny how some of these humps had tough, leathery hides and others fell apart like nothing. A few shredded to bits while they were still on the line. A couple of firm yanks to get them over the roof’s edge and they were meaty jigsaw puzzles. Disappointing.

  Eddie held the extremity up and looked into the bones, which were hollow. Wasn’t there supposed to be marrow in there? Eddie’s pop had been a marrow sucker, which was totally gross. As a kid he’d watch his pop dig this nasty brown paste out of the bones of whatever meat dish mama had made, and then suck the bone. When Eddie was hungry he’d feel the acid in his stomach eating away the lining. He remembered hearing something about how when you’re starving you begin to digest yourself. That’s what these humps must be doing, only there was nothing left to digest.

  At this point maybe it was just a waiting game. The Comet knew facts they didn’t.

  “Smarter than the average bear,” Eddie said, beaming.

  “What? Who?” Dave asked, his eyes averted from Eddie’s actions.

  “The Comet. I’m conducting some scientific Frankenstein shit all up in this bitch. Who was onto Mona’s drug therapy? The Comet. Who knew the humps were falling apart? The Comet.” Sweat escaped the bandana and ran right into Eddie’s eyes. “Motherfucker,” he said with a wince. With one forearm he wiped away the offending liquid, with the other he pulverized the hump’s head with a wrench. “That’s a solid day’s work. Those bitches,” he said, gesturing vaguely, “they don’t have any appreciation for the work I’m doing up here. I’m breaking scientific ground like that nigger who made peanut butter.”

  Dave shot a look over at Dabney.

  “What?” Eddie beefed. “I’m paying him a compliment. I fuckin’ like peanut butter. Anyway, other than the spooky bitch, who else earns his keep around here? Who else is proactive? Remember that proactiv
e and paradigm shit they used to throw at us at work?”

  Dave nodded.

  “Remember that time Staci Kulbertson—Tim McTaggert’s assistant—remember when she got loose at that company party? That was ill, bro. She was shakin’ that ass like she was trying to get rid of it. I’d of taken it off her hands, bro.”

  Dave stared at Eddie, not knowing what to say. Where was this coming from?

  “Man, I’m sweatin’ like a bitch,” Eddie said, grinning. “It’s man’s work wasting these humps. I wish it would rain again so I could shower, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Dave nodded.

  “Cat got your tongue, Davis?”

  “No, Eddie.”

  “So what’s the what, bro? Why the long fuckin’ face?”

  “I can’t do this any more, Eddie” Dave said, tears beginning to moisten his cheeks. “This isn’t normal. This is some fucked-up Abu Ghraib shit you’re doing up here.”

  “Technically that shit wasn’t torture,” Eddie sneered.

  “Maybe. I can’t take much more, anyway. This is some seriously repugnant shit. It’s sickening. And if you weren’t so gaga from those pills—”

  Eddie rose from his task, bloodied wrench gripped white-knuckle tight in his fist, disgust burning in his wide-open eyes. Dave edged away. Eddie’s eyes weren’t right. They danced in their sockets, animated by lunacy and carnage.

  “Why don’t you blow me?” Eddie snarled.

  “That’s real mature.”

  “It wasn’t a figure of speech. I mean it. Blow me.”

  “That gravy train’s over, Eddie,” Dave said, now stifling sobs. “Maybe it took the apocalypse to realize what I am, but it’s over. Seriously. We’re finished. Done. You’ve got your porn. You’ve got your hobby. You’ve got your problems. But me? Me you don’t get. Not any more,” Dave said, voice cracking. Then he spun around and made a break for it, leaping the low hurdles as he’d done countless times before. Eddie pursued, but his athleticism fell more into brute categories than those utilizing speed and agility. Dave got to the stairwell housing and down two flights of steps before his wolfish buddy was even to the middle roof that separated them.