by Nick Clausen
He picks the bowl back up and carries it into the living room, the others following him like a parade, only Dennis stays in the kitchen.
The zombie in the tarp bag is still wriggling and moaning but has made no visible progress in getting himself out of his prison. So, Dan puts the bowl on the table, then looks at William and Liv. “You think we need to say anything?”
Liv shrugs. “She said something with ‘rise’ when she did it the first time around, but I can’t remember the rest.”
“Just try it,” William offers. “We’ll see what happens.”
Dan nods. Then he sticks his fingers into the bowl.
“No, wait!” William exclaims.
“What?”
“Dude, are you just gonna use your hand?” William says, a look of disgust on his face.
“This was how Birgit did it,” Dan says. “And it’s just blood.”
“Just blood,” William scoffs. “All right, Rambo. Suit yourself.”
Dan takes a handful of the blood water, holds it over the bowl for a couple of seconds, letting it drip.
“Rise,” he says, then flings the pink water at the tarp.
He has no idea what to expect.
What happens is very anti-climactic. There’s no gush of wind, no flames going out, no roar or bang or any other sounds.
The tarp bag simply stops moving, and the zombie stops groaning. It’s like an electric toy having its power cut.
For several, long seconds, they all just stare at the bag.
“Shit,” William says, breaking the silence. “Something definitely happened.” He looks at Dan. “Do we check?”
“Let’s wait a little longer,” Dan says. “We’ll give it five minutes. If he still hasn’t moved or said anything, we’ll open the bag.”
William is about to say something, when he notices Ozzy. The dog slinks over to the tarp, sniffing it. His hair isn’t bristling, and he doesn’t look particularly alert, more like curious.
“That’s a good sign,” William says, smiling tentatively. “Ozzy doesn’t seem to consider the guy a threat anymore.”
“God, what if it really worked?” Liv breathes. “What if this is the cure?”
Dan nods slowly. “It seems promising. Let’s give it a little more time. If he really is dead in there, we’ll try it on the zombies outside.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Dennis feels very funny. In fact, with every passing minute, he feels more and more so.
It’s a strange sensation, one he’s never felt before.
Except that’s not entirely true. He has felt like this before, only it was a very, very long time ago, almost too long to remember.
Is this what grief feels like? Is this a normal reaction when you lose someone you love? Dennis isn’t so sure about that. It doesn’t feel like an emotional reaction, more like a change taking place in his brain.
Something’s happening to me, a thought prods him.
He gets to his feet. The others are still in the living room, talking. Dennis heard them use the potion, and since he can no longer hear the zombie groan in there, he assumes it worked. Dennis cares very little about that for now, however; his attention is consumed at what’s going on inside him.
He goes to the window and stands on his toes to look over the heads of the dead people. He can just make out Mom behind them, at least her white gown is visible in the darkness.
He feels a deep stab in his heart region.
There’s the emotion, he thinks to himself. And he’s kind of glad it’s there. The heartache means he’s not losing his mind.
Still, whatever else is going on with him is different from the emotional reaction, he senses that very distinctly. He feels almost light-headed, like a fog is lifting from his mind.
What is this? Please, I need to know …
“It’s all in here.”
Mom’s voice speaking from his memory. She touched his chest when she said that. Dennis reenacts the gesture with his own hand, and he looks down to see the gris-gris between his chest and his palm.
Dennis frowns. He thought Mom was talking about his heart, but maybe … maybe …
Dennis takes off the gris-gris and studies it. It looks the way it has always looked; just a regular leather pouch. Dennis knows it’s empty, but he still opens it, hoping against hope to find something inside. Something Mom has left for him.
There’s nothing, though. The gris-gris is empty.
But just as he’s about to close it, he notices something that he’s seen a hundred times. The engraved letters on the inside of the flap. Dennis has never known what the words meant; he’s never been interested in them before. But now, they suddenly seem very important.
Some spells only end with the one who cast them.
Dennis reads the line, then rereads it. It’s only after reading it a third time that he realizes how easy it is. Normally, he struggles to put the letters into words and the words into meaningful sounds.
Dennis looks around for something else to read. There’s a piece of paper sitting on the door to Holger’s fridge. It’s a manual for something technical, a water pump or something. Dennis goes and looks at it. His eyes automatically begin reading. There are a lot of difficult words, yet he reads the whole thing with no problems.
And what’s more: he understands it too.
“What’s going on with me?” Dennis whispers, feeling his heartrate go up a little. He looks around the kitchen, and suddenly everything seems very clear, almost painfully so, as though his surroundings have grown sharper. He sees them more clearly. He hears them. All the impressions reach his brain without any delay, without anything to take the edge off. His thoughts are like that too, crisp and loud in his mind. Nothing slowing them down.
“You okay?”
Dennis turns to look at William standing in the doorway, looking at him with a worried expression.
“You look a little pale, dude. You might want to sit down.”
“It’s okay, I’m just a little … I don’t know,” Dennis hears himself say. His own voice even sounds clearer to him.
Liv and Dan both appear next to William.
“How are you feeling, Dennis?” Dan asks.
Dennis shrugs. “I feel fine, really. I feel … present.” The word slips out before Dennis can think about it. He’s never used that word before; he never even knew what it meant.
“You sound different,” Liv remarks.
“No shit,” William says. “He sounds ten years older all of a sudden. What’s happening to you, dude?”
Dennis shakes his head and looks down at his hands. “Something is changing. Or changing back, actually.”
“Changing back?” Dan repeats. “What does that mean, Dennis?”
“I … I don’t know. It’s very strange.”
“He’s going into shock,” William says. “Poor guy couldn’t handle losing his mom.”
“It’s not that,” Dennis says. “It’s got nothing to do with—”
He was going to finish the sentence by saying “Mom,” but something holds him back at the last second. Because this does have something to do with Mom. It’s got everything to do with her, in fact. Dennis feels that with a deep certainty.
His attention is once more drawn to the gris-gris, and he takes it off again, opens it and reads the engravement. This time, he reads it out loud.
“Some spells only end with the one who cast them.”
“What does that mean?” Dan asks.
Dennis looks at him. “I think … I think it means I was under some sort of spell. And it ended when Mom died just now.”
“What kind of spell?” William asks, frowning.
Dennis shakes his head. “I don’t know, but … it was something making me feel very different. Now, as it’s changing, I feel like a cloud is lifting from my mind. Like I said, I can think a whole lot clearer. I can read without difficulty.”
William glances at Dan, then back at Dennis. “Dude, you sound like you’re having a
trip.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Liv says. “He sounds normal.”
“Normal,” Dennis repeats, and it’s like that word is a password unlocking another room in his brain. Suddenly, he sees himself as a four-year-old, playing in the garden on a winter day, building a snowman. “I used to be normal,” Dennis whispers. “Before I had the brain fever. This was what it felt like. Being normal.”
“You had a brain fever?” William asks. “When?”
“When I was four.”
“How did it happen?” Dan asks. “What caused it?”
Dennis shrugs. “I don’t know, Mom never told me. I just remember being in the hospital. The doctors tried their best to cure me, but they couldn’t. So, Mom brought me home and … and made me better … she made me …” Dennis suddenly can’t get the words out. What Mom said just before she died rings out in his mind.
“I should have listened to the doctors … it’s all my fault … you must understand … I was only trying to help … I thought I could undo it …”
“The doctors, they … they failed to cure me,” he mutters. “At least that’s what she’s always told me, but … but I’m not so sure that’s actually what happened … I think … I think Mom might have been the one who … who made me this way, and … the doctors … the doctors saved me …”
Dennis feels a wave of dizziness roll over him, and he would have collapsed to the floor if William hadn’t jumped in to catch him.
“Dude, you really need to sit down,” he says, helping Dennis over to a chair. “Get him a glass of water, Dan.”
Dennis slumps down and rubs his forehead with both hands. “God, it’s like … everything is turning upside down.”
“Give it a rest for now,” William suggests. “You’re obviously reliving some fucked up trauma. Maybe don’t let it up to the surface all at once.”
But Dennis can’t help it, the images keep spilling out of his memory. Him in the hospital, Mom shouting at the doctors, her bringing him back home.
“They tried to help me,” Dennis whispers as Dan brings him a glass of water. He takes it, yet just stares at it. “But only after Mom had tried to cure me with voodoo.”
“So, you did have a brain fever?” Dan asks, sitting down across from him.
Dennis nods. “That part is true. I remember falling ill. But Mom didn’t trust doctors. She never did. When she finally realized she couldn’t help me, it was too late. The curse she put on me … it must have been one that couldn’t be lifted. It could only end when she died.”
“Holy shit,” William mumbles. “Talk about parents fucking up their kids; this a whole new level of social heritage. I’m really sorry, dude.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Dan says, sending Dennis a smile. “Just take it easy to begin with, okay? Give yourself time to get used to it.”
Dennis nods. That’s clever advice. Besides, there’s a torrent of different emotions raging in his stomach area, ranging from relief to grief to anger. It’ll take him time to sort it all out.
“The bad news is,” William says, “now that you’re normal again, you’ll have to pay taxes and all that boring shit the rest of us are dealing with.”
“You’ll also have to deal with William’s lame jokes,” Dan interjects, raising one eyebrow.
“Ey!” William cries out. “Uncalled for!”
Liv and Dan laugh, and Dennis can’t help but snort with laughter too, surprising himself. Jokes used to fly right by him, but now he gets it. As he looks at their faces, all three of them smiling back at him, he thinks to himself: Is this normal? This isn’t too bad.
THIRTY-FIVE
“Enough bantering,” William says, clapping his hands together. “Let’s go check on our guinea pig.”
They get up from the table and go to the living room.
Dan is relieved to find the tarp bag still lying completely still and no sounds coming from it.
“Here’s how we’ll do it,” William says, going to the bag, carrying the rifle. “I aim this at the head of the guy, and one of you cuts open the tarp. If he tries anything funny, I’ll blast him to hell and we’ll have to rethink the entire thing. Okay?”
“Okay,” Dan says. “I’ll cut the tarp. You two, stay back.”
Liv and Dennis stay by the doorway as Dan goes back to the kitchen and gets a knife from the drawer. He then reenters the living room and places himself next to the bag, opposite of William.
“You ready?” he asks.
William places the rifle against his shoulder, pointing the barrel at the place where the zombie’s head must be located. “Ready.”
Ozzy whimpers from the doorway.
Dan takes a deep breath, then bends over and pushes the point of the knife through the tarp. He’s careful, not cutting too deep, not wanting to cut the zombie. He drags the knife down, sliding easily through the tarp and the tape, opening the whole thing like a giant wallet.
Then he steps back quickly.
William holds the rifle for a couple of seconds before lowering it. “I think we’re good. He looks awfully dead.”
Dan steps forward again, peering down into the open tarp bag. The zombie was a young, skinny guy. He’s lying in a fetal position, his head turned to the side, his eyes closed. He’s obviously dead, as William noted, but he doesn’t look undead.
“His skin color is different,” Liv says, joining Dan. “It’s normal again.”
“We should check his eyes,” Dan suggests.
“Wait,” William says, placing the rifle against the temple of the guy. “Okay, go.”
Dan reaches down and carefully pries open the guy’s left eye using two fingers.
“Holy shit,” William says, taking away the rifle. “His pupils and irises are back.”
“This is very promising,” Dan says, letting out a breath he wasn’t aware he was holding. “I think it actually worked …”
“We’ll have to test it some more,” Liv says, sounding elated. “We can try it on those outside.”
“Way ahead of you,” William says, grabbing the bowl and striding out to the stairs. Dan, Liv and Dennis all follow him upstairs.
They go to the room facing the courtyard, and William hands Dan the bowl. Then he opens both windows wide and brings the bowl. For a terrible moment, Dan thinks he’ll chuck the whole thing down over the zombies below, but he just holds the bowl ready.
“Come on,” he says, gesturing with his head while looking at Dan. “You already touched the shit, so I assume you won’t mind doing the honors again?”
Dan goes over and picks up a handful of the red water. He leans out the window, looks down at the dead people clambering away at the windows, and then he drops the water on them.
Liv and William and Dennis all squeeze in next to him, eager to look down at what happens.
The water spreads out as it falls, forming a shower of drops which lands across the herd of zombies. About a dozen or so collapse immediately to the ground.
“Holy shit!” William exclaims, laughing shrilly. “It fucking worked like a charm! Do it again!”
“No, wait!” Liv says, as Dan is about to grab another handful of the water. “We can’t use it all.”
“You’re right,” Dan says, biting his lip. “This is all the potion we’ve got.”
William sits the bowl down on a table, then begins pacing the room. “Fuck me. We’ve got the cure right here, but what good will it do? Even if we use it sparingly, there’s only enough for, what, a hundred zombies? That’s like pissing into a firestorm. There must be millions of zombies all over Europe now.”
“We need to replicate it,” Liv says. “Do the whole ritual again and make more of the potion.”
“How would we do that?” William says, flinging out his hands. “The woman who did it is dead—sorry, Dennis. It took her like four hours to do the ritual, and we have no idea what she said or did. And even if we could do it again, that would be late, too late, the Americans will have dropped thei
r bombs by then, and we’ll all be—”
“Wait, what?” Liv blurts out.
William looks at her, then at Dan. “Oh, right. I didn’t tell you. The soldiers who brought me here … they told me some pretty bleak news. The day after tomorrow, they’ll begin flattening Europe, using nuclear weapons.”
“Oh, no,” Liv gasps.
“I know,” William says, shrugging. “I don’t know what I was thinking coming back here. Guess I was hoping for some sort of Hail Mary. But right now, that seems pretty fucking hopeless.”
“Can’t we just dilute it?” Liv suggests. “Maybe make more of it that way?”
Dan shakes his head. “You heard what Birgit said just before she died. It can’t be diluted.”
William slumps down onto a chair. Liv chews her lip, and Dan lowers his head. For several seconds, they all seem to work on the seemingly hopeless conundrum.
“That’s not what she meant.”
Dan turns to look at Dennis.
He holds out his hands. “When she said it couldn’t be diluted.”
“What did she mean then?” William asks.
“She meant the potion can’t be diluted.”
“I fail to see the difference,” William says.
“She wasn’t telling us that we mustn’t dilute it; she was telling us it will never dilute, no matter how much water we add.”
William looks at Dan, then back at Dennis. “Are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely,” Dennis says. “I knew my mother.”
“That means we can scale it up,” Liv says, hope coming back into her voice. “We can make a shitload of it.”
“Wait, how’s that even possible?” William asks. “I know we’re dealing with supernatural shit here, but how can you make a potion that won’t dilute?”
Dennis shrugs. “I have no idea.”
“I think I do,” Dan says, and the others look at him intently. “She said the spell was like a doorway, and that it could be bound to water. A doorway can’t be diluted. It’s not a thing; it’s a passage for things to go through.”
“Right, I remember that part about the Big Angel coming through or whatever,” William says. “But that still doesn’t explain why that spell won’t be diluted if we add more water.”
