Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041)

by Gonzales, Manuel

  Perhaps it was the tone of his voice, the surety of it, the assumption that I was like him, that everyone was like him, and how little room for argument there was in what he said and how he looked at me. Whatever it was, like an idiot, I followed after him.

  Regardless, Roger is a guy I can’t make up my mind on. A guy I can’t get a good read on.

  He’s a mystery, and that makes me nervous.

  Take, for instance, that action he played with the Louisville Slugger. I didn’t see where he got it from, but I saw him wielding it with a fierce determination, watched him knock the head off one about to eat Mary’s brains out, saw him pose after the swing, as if for Sports Illustrated, as if he’d hit a home run, heard him, as he helped Mary to her feet, say, “That’s a stand-up double if I ever saw one,” and I’ll admit, since I saw him perform that nifty little trick, I’ve wanted to give it a go myself, except that, thanks to Tyrone’s dad, the bat’s gone.

  Which was cool and all, what Roger did with the baseball bat, but then he’s earnest to the point of embarrassment. Like after Tyrone’s dad lost that bat, and we were all quiet and uncertain as to what to say to Tyrone, except for maybe “That was some kind of stupid, what your dad just did,” all of us quiet, that is, until Roger sat on his haunches and held Tyrone by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes and told him, “That makes you the man of the house, now, Tyrone.”

  Told him, “Do you think you’re ready for that?”

  And then when Tyrone shook his head no, and while the rest of us, I’m sure, were thinking, Roger, give it a rest, leave the kid alone, Roger gave him a bit of a shake and told him, “I think you are.

  “I think you’re stronger than you think.

  “I think you’re stronger than all of us.

  “But that doesn’t mean you can’t cry, that doesn’t mean you can’t be sad.

  “Only really strong guys like you and me know it’s okay to be sad and it’s okay to cry, but that we still have to be strong, right?”

  And Tyrone started to snuffle and started to nod, and Roger said, “Right?”

  And Tyrone’s lips moved, but maybe it was a quiver and maybe it was him saying, “Right.”

  And Roger said, softly now, “Right?” and then pulled Tyrone into a bear hug, which set Tyrone into a sloppy hiccuping mess of sobs and snot, at which point I looked around with a do-we-have-time-for-this-sort-of-thing? look on my face, only to find everyone else mooning over the scene, Mary with her hand pressed up against her chest and the security guard wiping his eyes in that way men sometimes do when they find themselves crying unexpectedly at the end of a movie.

  I want to hate him, in other words, maybe because he’s everything that I’m not, or maybe because he’s the type of person who wants me to believe that he’s everything I’m not, but then there’s some strong and growing part of me that wants to admire him, too, can’t help but admire him, and that just makes me want to hate him even more.

  The news has spread that we’re making our way out through the ceiling. I wonder what this means for the one among us who is infected.

  Because he’s the biggest of us, the security guard is hoisted up first. Roger and me and two other guys, whose names I don’t know or don’t remember, heave him up there, and I watch him scramble and pull himself the rest of the way up, wondering why it is that I can’t remember or don’t know his name, either.

  Then Roger turns to me and says, “Okay, Cowboy, you next.”

  I’m not sure why he has decided all of a sudden to call me Cowboy, but, against my better judgment, I decide I kind of like it.

  The plan is for the security guard, who is also the strongest (or so we’ve all assumed) to lower himself down enough to help lift up the rest of us. He tries it first with me, but the two of us together are too much weight for the flimsy ceiling tiles and supports. The whole thing starts to crack and collapse before he simply lets go of me and I crash down on top of Roger.

  “That won’t work,” the security guard says, and it’s hard for me to believe, but I think that’s the first time I’ve heard him speak, and the sound of his voice, nasal and off-pitched, makes me for a moment reconsider his story. No longer a tough guy or a former addict trying to atone, he now strikes me as that kid, pale and a role-player, weak and trembling through high school, who discovered that the kind of devotion he heaped onto twenty-sided dice and gamemasters could be more beneficially applied to a gym membership. And while he might now be a much bigger geeky, trembly, insecure nerd, he’s still a nerd all the same, and I wonder why he hasn’t died yet.

  “Good call,” Roger says, as he picks himself up. “Gonna have to figure something else out.”

  Then he looks at me, and I don’t know what he’s about to propose, but I know I don’t much like the look in his eyes or the attention he’s giving me.

  “All right, Cowboy, time for you to shine,” he says to me, and now I realize how stupid the name he’s given me really sounds. “This is taking way too long. I’m going to need you to scout ahead for us, find us the way out, so that once we get everyone up there, we’re not just a bunch of ants scrambling around in our ant pile.” Then he slaps me hard on the shoulder with his good hand, and then he looks up and calls out, “Okay, Francis, scooch on back, and we’re going to help Cowboy here the way we did you.”

  Is Francis the security guard’s name? I wonder. Or is Francis a nickname?

  And then, before I can think about it too long, I’m lifted and heaved and shoved upward, and I panic for a moment because there’s nothing for me to grab hold of or on to that hasn’t been bent or cracked or crumbled by Francis, the security guard. Then I see a rail within reach and lunge for it, or try to lunge for it, unleveraged as I am, and I hear one of the guys below squeal as I accidentally kick him in the face while lunging. I grab hold and pull myself into the ceiling, and I wonder what the hell I’m supposed to do next.

  I also wonder why Francis couldn’t have gone in search of a way out.

  “Maybe that way?” he whispers, though I don’t know that, if we spoke in our normal voices, the creatures in the mall could hear us or do anything about us either way. “I think, depending on which supply closet we ran into, your best bet is either going to be that way, or back over there,” he says, pointing to my right and then over my shoulder. It’s not a lot to go on, but I go right, anyway, because I hate going backward.

  About ten minutes and twenty yards into my search for a way out, I begin to wonder if it all isn’t some elaborate ruse. If sending me on this search for a way out wasn’t part of Roger’s plan to begin with; if, in fact, I’m the one they all suspect of being the one among us who is infected. And then I wonder, Am I?

  But, no, I’m not.

  But am I, maybe?

  No.

  But, maybe?

  Then, to put the argument to rest, which is a dumb argument to have with myself in the first place, I perform a quick body check—head, hands, legs, arms, feet—and find myself completely free of scratches, bites, or wounds of any kind, and finally I move on.

  At one point, my foot punches through a ceiling tile and I hear a commotion below, a sound of moaning and scrambling and yelping. I don’t know what to expect when I look through the hole left by my foot. An undulating mass of undead bodies, I guess, but even imagining that, the picture doesn’t linger for long before being replaced by the kind of shot you’d see in a movie, a medium-long shot that pulls you out of the mall and into the parking lot, which you can see is surrounded by them, and then farther still, to a long and wide shot of the city—cars abandoned, streets overrun—and then maybe a series of close-up shots in quick succession:

  —A woman, screaming, clutching her baby as she runs from a gang of them, so racked with fear she doesn’t realize her baby is already dead, and, worse still, changed or changing into one of them;


  —A man on a rooftop, cornered and with no other choice but to jump, to kill himself rather than be eaten and transformed, only to be caught and saved by the very thing he feared;

  —At least one hopeful image of a little kid or a couple of little kids with bats or sticks or some strange build-a-better-mousetrap contraption taking out at least one of these monsters;

  —And then back to me, gazing in astonished horror at the sight below.

  That’s how I imagine it will be.

  How it is, looking at the undulating mass of undead bodies below me without the benefit of edits and quick cuts and pans and long shots and fades, is a different kind of unsettling thing altogether.

  For one thing, they’re looking right up at me.

  For another, they are, each one of them, smiling.

  It’s not a pretty sight, the sight of them smiling up at me. Their teeth have a wormy, gray quality to them. A rotted and soft yet somehow still dangerous quality to them.

  There is something, let’s say liquid, there is something liquid about their smiles or their teeth or the pulse of them watching me. Something liquid and alive and mesmerizing, and I begin to feel myself pitch forward. And only at the last moment, I grab hold again of the ceiling braces, and everything comes back into focus, and for a second, it looks to me as if they are laughing at me.

  I move away from the hole, and I push on, and I shove my foot or sometimes my hand through the ceiling tiles a few more times, and then I come to a wall, a dead end, and I stop.

  I wait.

  I breathe and listen and breathe some more.

  Hearing nothing but the sound of me, I remove a tile and lower my head down through the ceiling, and I want to close my eyes, just in case, but I don’t, and I see the exit, and I see the coast is clear, and I let out my breath.

  On my way back, I find Mary.

  I hear her before I see her. Or rather, what I hear is the sound of a tile break in half followed by a sharp gasp.

  When I find her, her left leg has gone completely through, and she’s sobbing, and I think, She’s a goner, for sure, she’s a goner. But I get to her and cover my hand over her mouth before she can really start to wail, which would lead them right to us, no doubt, and then that much closer to our way out. But she feels my hand on her mouth before she sees it’s me and that makes her bite my hand—though, give her credit, as I don’t know that I’d be desperate enough to bite one of these things if it snuck up on me—and that makes me want to hit her hard in the back of the head, but I don’t. “It’s just me,” I say through gritted teeth, my hand still over her mouth, or in her mouth, however you want to look at it. “It’s me, it’s me, I’ve found the way out,” I say.

  It is a way out, I know that for sure. It’s a run, twenty, thirty, forty yards, but straight and with a little coverage, too, so that if you run a little hunched, no one can see you.

  What surprises me most about this isn’t that I found a way out, though that is a bit of a shock, but that I found it and tried it, dropping down from the ceiling, landing loudly but safely and without drawing attention to myself, and then, hunching, ran to the glass doors, and pushed them open and then stepped outside into the bright midday sun. The parking lot was full of cars, though I don’t know why I expected it to be empty. I didn’t see anyone—neither people nor monsters—and I shaded my eyes and looked at the long expanse of cars and then over the concrete just past the cars and then down that road farther still, and I thought to myself, Now’s my chance. I could start running and not look back and no one will know, and I’ll be free, or I’ll have a better shot at being free and alive than if I go back inside, than if I go back for those fools still stumbling around the ceiling. But I didn’t run. I could have left, but I didn’t, and here I am, struggling to lift Mary, who doesn’t even know my name, back into the ceiling so I can help her escape, but not just her. Her and Tyrone and Roger and the security guard and those two other guys, or at least one of those two other guys because I’ve decided that the other one has got to be the one among us who is infected, and in the end, that is what surprises me most. I found my way out and didn’t take it.

  What happens next seems almost too easy. I point Mary in the right direction and then immediately stumble across those two other guys, and then point them in the right direction. And then I’m back where I started, and it’s unreal that I found my way back at all, let alone this quickly, and I wonder, Is this how your life starts to change? I wonder, Is this how Roger feels about every day? About every decision?

  “Francis,” I say.

  He turns, startled, and then smiles. “Cowboy,” he says.

  “I found the way out. You ready to go home?”

  “Hell yeah,” he says. “Just waiting on Roger and the kid.”

  And I surprise myself again when I tell him, “Go on. I can handle Tyrone.”

  He hesitates, but then I give him a look. It’s a look I’ve never given anyone before. It’s a look that says I got this. Says I’m in charge of some things, and I got this, so go take care of the rest of them, okay? Or says something like that, anyway.

  Whatever the look says, Francis buys it and starts off, and then Roger, straining with the weight of Tyrone, calls out, “What’s the holdup?”

  I lean down and grab for Tyrone, and he’s not as heavy as I expected him to be, and I lift him up, and the ceiling doesn’t collapse, and his arms don’t slip through my grasp, and I don’t pitch forward under the weight of him, and nothing bad happens, and I let the thought that maybe this is how things will be from now on filter softly into my head. When he’s finally up, I smile at him and pat him gently on the head and tell him something about how brave he’s been, how we’re proud of him, how I’m proud of him, and he smiles back and gives me a “Yeah, me, too,” or a “Thanks, Cowboy,” before I send him on his way.

  And right about then is when I realize that something funny just happened.

  I lean my head over the opening in the ceiling after Tyrone scrambles past me, and I look down at Roger, who’s looking up at me. I’m about to ask Roger why the hell he sent them all up and who the hell is the one who’s infected, but before I can say anything, two things happen.

  The first thing that happens is this: The door bursts open and a roiling mass of them fills the closet, a clawing, moaning, death-gray crowd of arms and legs and bloodied heads, and I think, Oh my God, they’ve got Roger.

  The second thing that happens is that Roger, still looking up at me, bares his rotted, wormy teeth at me.

  And then he leaps.

  I pull my head back in time, but only just. I see Roger’s dead hands grab blindly through the opening in the ceiling at whatever part of me he can catch hold of. Then he jumps again, and then again, and then I hear the crash of shelves and boxes on the floor, and while I’m not sure if zombie-like creatures can construct things like stacks of boxes to climb up on so they can follow after us, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to find out, so I leave.

  From that point forward, things go from bad to worse.

  I stumble across a hole in the ceiling and look down only long enough to catch sight of one of the men whose name I do not know, or parts of him, anyway, as they seem to have rendered him into his smallest components, such that I don’t know for sure which one he is, or was.

  For a moment, I wonder by what criteria they determine who is all-consumed and who is infected, but I don’t have much time to dwell on this, as I see Francis the security guard ahead of me, struggling to pull himself back into the ceiling. Suddenly we seem to be surrounded by weak or weakened ceiling tiles. I think I should help Francis, my security guard friend, but I have no desire to go down with that big ship. I slip past him. I feel bad for it, but that’s what I do. I slip by and then I hear and then come up on Tyrone.

  He’s looking down at his feet and then back up to his ha
nds, which barely grip the thin metal support. He doesn’t see me. His eyes are crazed with fear, or blank with it, or blinded by it, I don’t know. A huddle of them are jumping at him, grazing the tips of his sneakers. Any concerted effort on their part gets them their prize.

  But he’s not so heavy. And he’s a kid.

  I grab his arm and he squeals at my touch, jerks and tries to break free, and I almost let him drop. I shake him instead and repeat his name again and again and again, but I never find out if I get through to him. The ceiling drops out from under me, and I fall.

  I take them by surprise and knock two, maybe three to the floor by landing on them. I see Tyrone’s white shoe slip back into the blackness above us and take some pride in the fact that, while cooked myself, I pulled Tyrone out of the fire.

  Then they’re on me, grabbing at whatever’s in reach, and I choke on their smell, and I gag on the strips of their now rotted clothing flung into my mouth and nose and eyes. But there are too many of them and they are too eager to have at me, and for a moment I find myself in a kind of cocoon. A pocket made up of flailing arms and teeth and feet. Then one of them swipes at my face, so close I hear the soft whisht of air and feel its knuckle graze my nose, and that swipe lands in some hidden recess of their bodies and dislodges a packet of cigarettes from some torn pocket, and after the cigarettes falls a lighter.

  The ones nearest the one I light go up like dry kindling.

  And then I’m running, exhilarated by what I have just done, by what this might mean for me—not just escape from the mall, but a kind of escape from life, from my old life, from that tired old existence.