Undead and Unstable

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  “Sure.” “That man”?

  “I didn’t expect that,” she said in such a low voice, I had the impression she was talking to herself more than us. “That’s … nice. It’s really nice.” She looked at me again, and her eyes lost that look Sinclair had immediately noticed. For a second it was like I was looking at me, and not a shark with my face. “You’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to fix it … I don’t want to go back to that.”

  “You get that you’re not the victim here, right?”

  She didn’t rise to it. Just looked at me with eyes exactly like mine and near whispered, “Please help me. Please help yourself.” She didn’t even flinch when the glass exploded between her fingers, just looked at the mess of shattered glass splinters and milk and a little bit of her sluggish vamp blood. “Damn.”

  “Let me take a look,” Marc said, extending his hand. He’d said it with such authority that even as she let him grab her by the wrist, she looked bemused. “Huh. Not too bad. Let’s get it rinsed out first.”

  “I’ll be fine. You must know that.”

  “Humor the Walking Dead Doc, willya? This is the perfect way for me to keep busy. It’s not like if I fuck up I could do any real damage to you.”

  “How comforting,” she said wryly, but suffered herself to be pulled to her feet, and obediently followed him to the bathroom down the hall, the one with the first aid kit.

  Then I was in the kitchen by myself, with toaster innards all over the table and a mess of glass splinters and milk.

  What just happened?

  TWENTY-NINE

  “So she managed to stop being evil for three seconds and begged you to help her?” Jessica was strolling beside me down the aisle, popping green grapes into her mouth. “Weird. Or a trick. Or a weird trick.”

  “Tell me,” I said gloomily. “I think I like Wrinkly Me better when she’s being an imperious asshat.”

  “Glad I was napping and missed it.”

  Say it twice, honey. “Yeah. I sort of wish I’d missed it.”

  “Nope. That’s why you get all the queen perks.” She popped another grape into her mouth. “Comes with the job.”

  “Oh, perks? Is that what those are?” I reached out a hand and tumbled two cans of cranberry jelly into our cart. “Perks, my luscious white butt.”

  “Don’t make me think about your butt. No, not that kind. Get the real stuff.”

  I eyed the two cans rolling around with the can of sweet potatoes. “That is the real stuff.”

  “Cranberries are not can-shaped. Ergo, those aren’t proper cranberries.”

  I thought about running her down with the cart, then reconsidered. Probably couldn’t displace her mass with one measly grocery cart, anyway. “I’m hanging on by a thread here, Jess. A goddamn thread.”

  “Oh, here we go.”

  “I’ve gotta keep Zombie Marc occupied while Decrepit Me is slumming in her past for mysterious reasons she won’t explain while you’re furiously gestating, Sinclair’s hiding from me so I don’t accidentally skin him and then write on him, Nick keeps changing his name, I stupidly decided to host Thanksgiving, my mom’s dating a guy who looks like a giant baby, and I haven’t seen my brother-slash-foster son in days and don’t dare let him anywhere near the mansion right now. A goddamn thread!”

  “Canned cranberries are lame.”

  “Canned cranberries are the only thing I like about Thanksgiving.” I whipped two more cans into the cart. “Canned cranberries are the only thing letting me hang on to the shreds of my so-called sanity.”

  “At least buy real sweet potatoes.”

  “Canned sweet potatoes are real, you enormous harpy!”

  She shook the bag of grapes, now half empty, at me. “Are you trying to make me body conscious? I’m creating life here.”

  “Yeah, listen, that reminds me. There’s no way in heck you can be due next summer.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Jessica. Seriously. Look at you—and I say this with love—but look at you. You’re huge!”

  “Maybe I got my dates mixed up.” She shrugged. Gulp, gulp, and more grapes disappeared down her gullet. What the heck … if she didn’t care, then I didn’t, either. She probably did have her dates mixed up, what with all the weirdness that had been in our lives the last few years.

  “This is the kind of thing we need to put on the spreadsheet.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Never mind, we’ll talk about it later. Because right now, I’ve got bigger problems.” I glanced at her belly. Bigger emotionally, not bigger physically, clearly… “Oooch over, I gotta grab a turkey.”

  “Do you even know how to make a turkey?”

  “God makes turkeys, not me. I know how to cook ’em, though.” I’d gone through a Martha Stewart phase after I dropped out of college. Jessica (who’d been majoring in psych at the time) explained that I was trying to control my environment, since I felt so out of control after getting kicked out. I mean, dropping out.

  I also knew how to make “real” cranberry sauce, but then found out the real stuff is overrated. Who wants to spend the night picking cranberry skins out of your teeth? Blurgh. A wiggly can-shaped pile of cranberry jelly was the way to go.

  “Oh, come on! A Butterball?”

  “It’s a turkey, Jess. We need one. And here’s a bunch of ’em.” I pawed through the frozen carcasses. “Let’s see, you’re supposed to figure on a pound per person, except the dead people won’t eat. So … um … Nick/Dick, and my mom, and BabyJon (but he’s barely onto solid foods), and you’ll eat about nine pounds, but Sinclair and Marc and Garrett and I won’t, so that’s … um…” Math had never been a go-to skill of mine. Did I forget to carry the 1? “… um…”

  “Not a Butterball. At least get a fresh one. Or maybe kosher?”

  “To get a fresh one would mean I would have decided two weeks ago to host T’giving, ordered a fresh one, and in general be an organized, responsible person. What, out of anything you’ve seen since we were in junior high, would suggest—”

  “Right. Sorry. But Butterballs are so dry and boring.”

  “Turkey is dry and boring; don’t blame the brand. Stop being a rich snob.” Given that she was rich, I almost never had to say that. Jessica lived in skinny jeans (long before they were trendy, and now again after they weren’t) and T-shirts. We used to share a duplex in Apple Valley, and shopped at discount grocery stores like Cub and Rainbow.

  She could have bought a new Ferrari every month once she passed her driver’s license exam, but stuck with fuel-efficient four-doors like Toyota Camrys and Ford Fusions. The only reason she picked the mansion was because our old house had termites, and she figured a vampire queen should have a den, a basement lair, multiple guest rooms for entertaining, and a huge attic occasionally infested with zombies.

  “I’m not being a snob. I’m pretty sure. I’m just trying to be superhealthy for the baby.”

  “Or babies.” Triplets would explain the gut. So would septuplets.

  “Baby,” Jessica corrected firmly.

  I grabbed a 10-pound turkey and dropped it into the cart. My cart was pissing me off—one of those sneaky carts that seem fine at first, but then you find out one of the wheels sticks, so you have to pay attention or you’ll run into—

  “Sorry,” I told the thirty-something woman steering one of those huge carts that lets the parent strap both kids into a big plastic contraption hooked up to the grocery cart. Nobody asked me, but wouldn’t it be easier to just leave the rug rats in a freezing cold car while you got the holiday shopping done? “Uh, Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah, right,” she replied with the exact right amount of tired despair. Here was a kindred spirit, between the Butterballs and the twenty-foot stuffing display. Which reminded me.

  “Stove Top! Oh worse, Stove Top Mushroom? Come on, Bets. Are you trying to make this the least interesting meal ever?”

  “It takes five minutes and nobody giv
es a shit, Jessica. This is not New England. This is Minnesota, and we’ve all got more important things to do than make homemade oyster stuffing with walnuts and, I dunno, Craisins.”

  “Oooh. Craisins! That sounds good.”

  I was slumped over my cart, resting my chin on the steering wheel and steering with my elbows. “The problem is, I don’t have a plan. I don’t even have a plan to come up with a plan. The only thing I see ahead is nothing.”

  “Yeah, well.” She’d finished the grapes and was looking around at the various food displays. She spied a baking display and helped herself to a 24-ounce bag of chocolate chips. “That’s your thing. You sort of do everything by the hair of your ass. And sometimes it even works out.”

  “And sometimes people die. I just can’t get it together this time. I’m Maverick after Goose bit the big one at Miramar.”

  “A Top Gun reference? Seriously?”

  “I’ve lost my wingman,” I griped, struggling with the cart before it could veer and clip someone else—thank goodness for vampire strength! “And now I enjoy standing around in my tidy whities staring at my mirrored reflection as Tom Skerritt checks out my butt!”

  “Oh, the humanity.”

  “Why can’t that bitch just tell me? Huh? Fuck all that mysterious-visitor crap. Just tell me what went wrong and how to fix it.”

  “That bitch, Satan? That bitch, Elderly Betsy? That bitch, the Anti—”

  “Elderly Betsy. In the movies they’re always ‘Oooh, we gotta watch out we don’t make a paradox so I’m just gonna be all cryptic and unhelpful,’ and then everyone’s mystified when things don’t work out. I should just get my hands on her, find a blowtorch or something, and get busy until she tells me how to fix everything.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah, but effective, maybe.”

  “No, gross, and also that sets you on the road to Evil Town, which I know you’re trying to avoid.”

  “Let me have my dreams,” I sighed, and she left me to my morbid, torture-filled fantasies.

  THIRTY

  When we got back, I’d managed to put a few of my problems behind me to rave about the Lifetime Special du jour. Since I wasn’t having sex, and since I didn’t have a plan, and since there was a zombie creeping around, I was watching an unusual amount of television this month.

  “Okay, so then—check this—the heroine does this—”

  “But I hate Rene Russo,” Jess complained while I lugged bag after bag into the kitchen. “She was the least interesting thing in Outbreak. The monkey was a thousand times more interesting and it didn’t have to emote. And when her character got sick, okay, everyone else who caught it, they’re all bleeding out their ears and eyes, but she just sort of gets a mild flush. That’s how you knew Rene Russo had the deadly plague. They put more blush on her.”

  “You’ll like her in this, I bet. She did this remarkable thing. The killer called her and tried to get her to meet him, alone, and the only witness to his hideous unspeakable crime refused to do it.”

  “What?”

  I was unloading bags, stacking cans and frozen birds and boxes of Stove Top on the counter. “Yeah. She wouldn’t take off without a word to anyone to meet with the killer at midnight in the middle of a cornfield. Unprecedented! And then, when the killer tried to reschedule, she turned him down again. Yes!”

  “That does sound kind of cool,” Jess admitted.

  “This time, though, she refused to leave the safety of her living room to meet up with a shady guy in an abandoned office building by a wharf where all the streetlights had been broken out. She said no. And she lived to testify! Unprecedented! So, yeah, I wanna reward that behavior. I’m renting everything Rene Russo ever touched.”

  “You’re watching an unusual amount of TV these days.”

  “My thought exactly!”

  “Remember your Denzel marathon?”

  “One movie isn’t a marathon,” I corrected her, but I did remember. It was the day after Marc had killed himself, so I’d had to watch the movie three times in a row before I could even think about trying to do anything else: Feed. Cry. Rage. Think.

  * * *

  “I don’t need Dead Man Walking; I need Man on Fire.”

  “When was the last time you slept?” Jessica asked quietly.

  I ignored her, sorting through the DVDs. I needed the movie, not the book. The book was almost as much of a downer as DMW, which didn’t mean it was a bad book, just one I wouldn’t read twice. And not now, of all times.

  The movie version, though: totally different story. Denzel Washington’s character, Creasy, thought Dakota Fanning’s character had been kidnapped (she had been) and murdered (she hadn’t been). So he fucked with a bunch of bad guys and blew bad guys up and cut pieces off them and shot a few of them, and then he rescued Dakota Fanning and she got to go home to her mom. Yes, definitely a time to take MoF to heart as opposed to thinking about Sean Penn getting the needle while his nun friend watched helplessly and prayed and cried. “Where is the fucking thing? It was right here last week when Marc was teasing me about—about something else. Where the hell is it?”

  “It’s—it’s here. See? You buried it by accident while you were looking.”

  “At least that’s not a metaphor for anything awful,” I muttered. “Are you gonna watch with me?”

  “Betsy,” my friend said, with an expression on her face that meant she was picking her words with care, “Creasy died at the end. He saved the girl … and died.”

  I met her look. “So?”

  She had nothing to say to that.

  I guess I didn’t, either.

  “You should be glad I’m catching up on all the movies I never watch, what with dying and all.”

  “I’m kind of glad,” Jess admitted so diffidently I had to smile.

  “Movies? Cable television? Really? That’s your priority at this time?”

  Didn’t even have to look. I just shoved cans into random cupboards. “Get bent, Wretched Me.”

  “For God’s sake.” Hmm. Nice to see Evil Old Me could still break the third commandment. Wait. Fifth? “I sent Marc back to help you.”

  “Some help!” I whipped around and glared. “He slunk around and giggled and freaked everybody out and scared our Marc into killing himself. And stop wearing my clothes!”

  “Oh my God.” Jessica was all big eyes and open mouth. “I’m seeing it and I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh. Yes. Hello.” Rude Elderly Me tipped a shallow nod in my (our) best friend’s direction. “You’re looking round.”

  I gripped the one can of cranberry jelly I hadn’t put away. Right between the eyes … that ought to put a dent in her day. Not to mention her skull. “You watch how you talk to her, you clothes-grubbing harlot.”

  “I am here to—never mind why I’m here.”

  “See?” I said to Jessica, triumphant.

  “Yeah, the coy thing is definitely annoying,” my beloved brilliant best friend agreed.

  “It’s not only your turn to pull the freight, it’s your damned job. What do you want me to do, tattoo instructions on your forehead?”

  “You can’t talk to you like that,” Jessica scolded.

  “You hear but you don’t listen. You look but you don’t see.”

  “I fart but don’t stink. I shampoo but don’t condition. What are you doing here? What am I doing here, you horrible decrepit thing?”

  “Whoa,” Marc said, shambling in. Okay, maybe not shambling. He walked pretty much like he had in life. I had to work on letting go of my zombie stereotyping. I’d hated the term politically correct long before it was trendy, but I had to get over that, too.

  He didn’t shamble, he didn’t moan “Braaaaaains” while clutching at terrified roommates, he didn’t stare vacantly (except when he was watching Drogo’s scenes in Game of Thrones, but he’d done that in life, too) or hungrily (see above: only with Game of Thrones). He didn’t do any of that stuff. He was a zombie, but he was still Marc. He was
still my friend, and I was still his. As someone who resented being painted as a soulless bloodsucking dictator with a silly hard-on for good shoes (it wasn’t silly!), you’d think I’d catch on to that stuff a little quicker.

  He wasn’t a terrifying Pet Sematary zombie … he didn’t come back with demonic baggage. (And I’d thought toddlers were scary before I saw Gage Creed return from the grave.) He wasn’t lurch-ey or clumsy; Ancient Me apparently knew her shit when it came to raising the dead—and keeping the dead.

  At worst, he could be a speedy zombie. My God! I had hated the Dawn of the Dead remake zombies … they could run people down like a jaguar after a gazelle! I’d been so, so happy when movies and the TNT network went back to classic, shambling zombies.

  “I forgot how much milling around we all did in the past,” Ancient Me said, holding her head like she was getting a migraine. “All milling, no action. Until we were pushed to the wall. And then it was often too late.”

  “Okay, that was almost helpful.” I could feel myself perking up. “If you could elaborate just a teensy bit…”

  Before she could, a wild-eyed Nickie/Dickie/Tavvi burst through the kitchen door. “You didn’t answer my texts!” he cried.

  “What texts?” Jessica fished her phone out of her purse, then looked up with a grimace. “Sorry, Dickie.”

  “Ugh,” I muttered.

  “Sorry, Dickie, but I didn’t know my phone was off.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “It’s his name. Suck it up.”

  “So you’re okay?” He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her. As much as he could, anyway. I had to applaud his heroic effort. “Jeez, don’t do that. I was shitting bricks.”

  “Gross,” Marc commented.

  “Aw, it’s cute,” I teased. “In a nauseating overprotective and creepy way.”

  “And you!” The Artist Formerly Known as Nick let go of Jessica’s “waist” and whipped around. “This is more or less your fault.”

  “Well, you’re probably right,” I admitted, “but I’m not sure why. Or what I can—”