Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Not even Batu knew what the zombies were up to. Sometimes he said that they were just another thing you had to deal with in retail. They were the kind of customer that you couldn’t ever satisfy, the kind of customer who wanted something you couldn’t give them, who had no other currency, except currency that was sinister, unwholesome, confusing, and probably dangerous.

  Meanwhile, the things that the zombies tried to purchase were plainly things that they had brought with them into the store—things that had fallen, or been thrown into the Ausible Chasm, like pieces of safety glass. Rocks from the bottom of Ausible Chasm. Beetles. The zombies liked shiny things, broken things, trash like empty soda bottles, handfuls of leaves, sticky dirt, dirty sticks.

  Eric thought maybe Batu had it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be a transaction. Maybe the zombies just wanted to give Eric something. But what was he going to do with their leaves? Why him? What was he supposed to give them in return?

  Eventually, when it was clear Eric didn’t understand, the zombies drifted off, away from the counter and around the aisles again, or out the doors, making their way like raccoons, scuttling back across the road, still clutching their leaves. Batu would put away his notebook, go into the storage closet, and send off his faxes.

  The zombie customers made Eric feel guilty. He hadn’t been trying hard enough. The zombies were never rude, or impatient, or tried to shoplift things. He hoped that they found what they were looking for. After all, he would be dead someday too, and on the other side of the counter.

  Maybe his friend Dave had been telling the truth and there was a country down there that you could visit, just like Canada. Maybe when the zombies got all the way to the bottom, they got into zippy zombie cars and drove off to their zombie jobs, or back home again, to their sexy zombie wives, or maybe they went off to the zombie bank to make their deposits of stones, leaves, linty, birdsnesty tangles, all the other debris real people didn’t know the value of.

  It wasn’t just the zombies. Weird stuff happened in the middle of the day too. When there were still managers and other employers, once, on Batu’s shift, a guy had come in wearing a trench coat and a hat. Outside, it must have been ninety degrees, and Batu admitted he had felt a little spooked about the trench coat thing, but there was another customer, a jogger, poking at the bottled waters to see which were coldest. Trench-coat guy walked around the store, putting candy bars and safety razors in his pockets, like he was getting ready for Halloween. Batu had thought about punching the alarm. “Sir?” he said. “Excuse me, sir?”

  The man walked up and stood in front of the counter. Batu couldn’t take his eyes off the trench coat. It was like the guy was wearing an electric fan strapped to his chest, under the trench coat, and the fan was blowing things around underneath. You could hear the fan buzzing. It made sense, Batu had thought: this guy had his own air-conditioning unit under there. Pretty neat, although you still wouldn’t want to go trick-or-treating at this guy’s house.

  “Hot enough for you?” the man said, and Batu saw that this guy was sweating. He twitched, and a bee flew out of the gray trench coat sleeve. Batu and the man both watched it fly away. Then the man opened his trench coat, flapped his arms, gently, gently, and the bees inside his trench coat began to leave the man in long, clotted, furious trails, until the whole store was vibrating with clouds of bees. Batu ducked under the counter. Trench-coat man, bee guy, reached over the counter, dinged the register in a calm and experienced way so that the drawer popped open, and scooped all the bills out of the till.

  Then he walked back out again and left all his bees. He got in his car and drove away. That’s the way that all All-Night stories end, with someone driving away.

  But they had to get a beekeeper to come in, to smoke the bees out. Batu got stung three times, once on the lip, once on his stomach, and once when he put his hand into the register and found no money, only a bee. The jogger sued the All-Night parent company for a lot of money, and Batu and Eric didn’t know what had happened with that.

  Karanlýk ne zaman basar?

  When does it get dark?

  Eric has been having this dream recently. In the dream, he’s up behind the counter in the All-Night, and then his father is walking down the aisle of the All-Night, past the racks of magazines and towards the counter, his father’s hands full of stones from the Ausible Chasm. Which is ridiculous: his father is alive, and not only that, but living in another state, maybe in a different time zone, probably under a different name.

  When he told Batu about it, Batu said, “Oh, that dream. I’ve had it too.”

  “About your father?” Eric said.

  “About your father,” Batu said. “Who do you think I meant, my father?”

  “You haven’t ever met my father,” Eric said.

  “I’m sorry if it upsets you, but it was definitely your father,” Batu said. “You look just like him. If I dream about him again, what do you want me to do? Ignore him? Pretend he isn’t there?”

  Eric never knew when Batu was pulling his leg. Dreams could be a touchy subject. Eric thought maybe Batu was nostalgic about sleeping, maybe Batu collected pajamas in the way that people nostalgic about their childhoods collected toys.

  Another dream, one that Eric hasn’t told Batu about. In this dream, Charley comes in. She wants to buy a Mountain Dew, but then Eric realizes that all the Mountain Dews have little drowned dogs floating in them. You can win a prize if you drink one of the dog sodas. When Charley gets up to the counter with an armful of doggy Mountain Dews, Eric realizes that he’s got one of Batu’s pajama tops on, one of the inside-out ones. Things are rubbing against his arms, his back, his stomach, transferring themselves like tattoos to his skin.

  And he hasn’t got any pants on.

  Batýk gemilerle ilgileniyorum.

  I’m interested in sunken ships.

  “You need to make your move,” Batu said. He said it over and over, day after day, until Eric was sick of hearing it. “Any day now, the shelter is going to find someone to replace her, and Charley will split. Tell you what you should do, you tell her you want to adopt a dog. Give it a home. We’ve got room here. Dogs are good practice for when you and Charley are parents.”

  “How do you know?” Eric said. He knew he sounded exasperated. He couldn’t help it. “That makes no sense at all. If dogs are good practice, then what kind of mother is Charley going to be? What are you saying? So say Charley has a kid, you’re saying she’s going to put it down if it cries at night or wets the bed?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Batu said. “The only thing I’m worried about, Eric, really, is whether or not Charley may be too old. It takes longer to have kids when you’re her age. Things can go wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?” Eric said. “Charley’s not old.”

  “How old do you think she is?” Batu said. “So what do you think? Should the toothpaste and the condiments go next to the Elmer’s glue and the hair gel and lubricants? Make a shelf of sticky things? Or should I put it with the chewing tobacco and the mouthwash, and make a little display of things that you spit?”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “Make a little display. I don’t know how old Charley is, maybe she’s my age? Nineteen? A little older?”

  Batu laughed. “A little older? So how old do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. He squinted at Batu. “Thirty-five? Forty?”

  Batu looked pleased. “You know, since I started sleeping less, I think I’ve stopped getting older. I may be getting younger. You keep on getting a good night’s sleep, and we’re going to be the same age pretty soon. Come take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

  “Not bad,” Eric said. “We could put watermelons with this stuff too, if we had watermelons. The kind with seeds. What’s the point of seedless watermelons?”

  “It’s not such a big deal,” Batu said. He knelt down in the aisle, marking off inventory on his clipboard. “No big thing if Charley�
��s older than you think. Nothing wrong with older women. And it’s good you’re not bothered about the ghost dogs or the biting thing. Everyone’s got problems. The only real concern I have is about her car.”

  “What about her car?” Eric said.

  “Well,” Batu said. “It isn’t a problem if she’s going to live here. She can park it here for as long as she wants. That’s what the parking lot is for. But whatever you do: if she invites you to go for a ride, don’t go for a ride.”

  “Why not?” Eric said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Think about it,” Batu said. “All those dog ghosts.” He scooted down the aisle on his butt. Eric followed. “Every time she drives by here with some poor dog, that dog is doomed. That car is bad luck. The passenger side especially. You want to stay out of that car. I’d rather climb down into the Ausible Chasm.”

  Something cleared its throat; a zombie had come into the store. It stood behind Batu, looking down at him. Batu looked up. Eric retreated down the aisle, towards the counter.

  “Stay out of her car,” Batu said, ignoring the zombie.

  “And who will be fired out of the cannon?” the zombie said. It was wearing a suit and tie. “My brother will be fired out of the cannon.”

  “Why can’t you talk like sensible people?” Batu said, turning around and looking up. Sitting on the floor, he sounded as if he were about to cry. He swatted at the zombie.

  The zombie coughed again, yawning. It grimaced at them. Something was snagged on its gray lips now, and the zombie put up its hand. It tugged, dragging at the thing in its mouth, coughing out a black, glistening, wadded rope. The zombie’s mouth stayed open, as if to show that there was nothing else in there, even as it held the wet black rope out to Batu. The wet thing hung down from its hands and became pajamas. Batu looked back at Eric. “I don’t want them,” he said. He looked shy.

  “What should I do?” Eric said. He hovered by the magazines. Charlize Theron was grinning at him, as if she knew something he didn’t.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” It wasn’t clear to Eric whether Batu was speaking to the zombie. “I have all the pajamas I need.”

  The zombie said nothing. It dropped the pajamas into Batu’s lap.

  “Stay out of Charley’s car!” Batu said to Eric. He closed his eyes and began to snore.

  “Shit,” Eric said to the zombie. “How did you do that?”

  There was another zombie in the store now. The first zombie took Batu’s arms and the second zombie took Batu’s feet. They dragged him down the aisle and toward the storage closet. Eric came out from behind the counter.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “You’re not going to eat him, are you?”

  But the zombies had Batu in the closet. They put the black pajamas on him, yanking them over the other pair of pajamas. They lifted Batu up onto the mattress, and pulled the blanket over him, up to his chin.

  Eric followed the zombies out of the storage closet. He shut the door behind him. “So I guess he’s going to sleep for a while,” he said. “That’s a good thing, right? He needed to get some sleep. So how did you do that with the pajamas? Is there some kind of freaky pajama factory down there?”

  The zombies ignored Eric. They held hands and went down the aisles, stopping to consider candy bars and Tampax and toilet paper and all the things that you spit. They wouldn’t buy anything. They never did.

  Eric went back to the counter. He wished, very badly, that his mother still lived in their apartment. He would have liked to call someone. He sat behind the register for a while, looking through the phone book, just in case he came across someone’s name and it seemed like a good idea to call them. Then he went back to the storage closet and looked at Batu. Batu was snoring. His eyelids twitched, and there was a tiny, knowing smile on his face, as if he were dreaming, and everything was being explained to him, at last, in this dream. It was hard to feel worried about someone who looked like that. Eric would have been jealous, except he knew that no one ever managed to hold on to those explanations, once you woke up. Not even Batu.

  Hangi yol daha kýsa?

  Which is the shorter route?

  Hangi yol daha kolay?

  Which is the easier route?

  Charley came by at the beginning of her shift. She didn’t come inside the All-Night. Instead she stood out in the parking lot, beside her car, looking out across the road, at the Ausible Chasm. The car hung low to the ground, as if the trunk were full of things. When Eric went outside, he saw that there was a suitcase in the backseat. If there were ghost dogs, Eric couldn’t see them, but there were doggy smudges on the windows.

  “Where’s Batu?” Charley said.

  “Asleep,” Eric said. He realized that he’d never figured out how the conversation would go, after that.

  He said, “Are you going someplace?”

  “I’m going to work,” Charley said. “Like normal.”

  “Good,” Eric said. “Normal is good.” He stood and looked at his feet. A zombie wandered into the parking lot. It nodded at them, and went into the All-Night.

  “Aren’t you going to go back inside?” Charley said.

  “In a bit,” Eric said. “It’s not like they ever buy anything.” But he kept an eye on the All-Night, and the zombie, in case it headed towards the storage closet.

  “So how old are you?” Eric said. “I mean, can I ask you that? How old you are?”

  “How old are you?” Charley said right back.

  “I’m almost twenty,” Eric said. “I know I look older.”

  “No you don’t,” Charley said. “You look exactly like you’re almost twenty.”

  “So how old are you?” Eric said again.

  “How old do you think I am?” Charley said.

  “About my age?” Eric said.

  “Are you flirting with me?” Charley said. “Yes? No? How about in dog years? How old would you say I am in dog years?”

  The zombie finished looking for whatever it was looking for inside the All-Night. It came outside and nodded to Charley and Eric. “Beautiful people,” it said. “Why won’t you ever visit my hand?”

  “I’m sorry,” Eric said.

  The zombie turned its back on them. It tottered across the road, looking neither to the left, nor to the right, and went down the footpath into the Ausible Chasm.

  “Have you?” Charley said. She pointed at the path.

  “No,” Eric said. “I mean, someday I will, I guess.”

  “Do you think they have pets down there? Dogs?” Charley said.

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. “Regular dogs?”

  “The thing I think about sometimes,” Charley said, “is whether or not they have animal shelters, and if someone has to look after the dogs. If someone has to have a job where they put down dogs down there. And if you do put dogs to sleep, down there, then where do they wake up?”

  “Batu says that if you need another job, you can come live with us at the All-Night,” Eric said. His lips felt so cold that it was hard to talk.

  “Is that what Batu says?” Charley said. She started to laugh.

  “Batu likes you,” Eric said.

  “I like him too,” Charley said. “But I don’t want to live in a convenience store. No offense. I’m sure it’s nice.”

  “It’s okay,” Eric said. “I don’t want to work retail my whole life.”

  “There are worse jobs,” Charley said. She leaned against her Chevy. “Maybe I’ll stop by later tonight. We could always go for a long ride, go somewhere else, and talk about retail.”

  “Like where? Where are you going?” Eric said. “Are you thinking about going to Turkey? Is that why Batu is teaching you Turkish?” He wanted to stand there and ask Charley questions all night long.

  “I want to learn Turkish so that when I go somewhere else I can pretend to be Turkish. I can pretend I only speak Turkish. That way no one will bother me,” Charley said.

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Good plan. We could always g
o somewhere and not talk, if you want to practice. Or I could talk to you, and you could pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying. We don’t have to go for a ride. We could just go across the road, go down into the Chasm. I’ve never been down there.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Charley said. “We can do it some other time.” Suddenly she looked much older.

  “No, wait,” Eric said. “I do want to come with you. We can go for a ride. It’s just that Batu’s asleep. Someone has to look after him. Someone has to be awake to sell stuff.”

  “So are you going to work there your whole life?” Charley said. “Take care of Batu? Figure out how to rip off dead people?”

  “What do you mean?” Eric said.

  “Batu says the All-Night is thinking about opening up another store, down there,” Charley said, waving across the road. “You and he are this big experiment in retail, according to him. Once the All-Night figures out what dead people want to buy, it’s going to be like the discovery of America all over again.”

  “It’s not like that,” Eric said. He could feel his voice going up at the end, as if it were a question. He could almost smell what Batu meant about Charley’s car. The ghosts, those dogs, were getting impatient. You could tell that. They were tired of the parking lot, they wanted to be going for a ride. “You don’t understand. I don’t think you understand?”

  “Batu said that you have a real way with dead people,” Charley said. “Most retail clerks flip out. Of course, you’re from around here. Plus you’re young. You probably don’t even understand about death yet. You’re just like my dogs.”

  “I don’t know what they want,” Eric said. “The zombies.”

  “Nobody ever really knows what they want,” Charley said. “Why should that change after you die?”

  “Good point,” Eric said.

  “You shouldn’t let Batu mess you around so much,” Charley said. “I shouldn’t be saying all this, I know. Batu and I are friends. But we could be friends too, you and me. You’re sweet. It’s okay that you don’t talk much, although this is okay too, us talking. Why don’t you come for a drive with me?” If there had been dogs inside her car, or the ghosts of dogs, then Eric would have heard them howling. Eric heard them howling. The dogs were telling him to get lost. They were telling him to fuck off. Charley belonged to them. She was their murderer.