by Kalifer Deil
Chapter One
Hope and Undead Elvis
Hope was playing Five-Card Draw with Undead Elvis when the world ended.
Well, he might have been Elvis. He certainly looked the part in his white sequined jumpsuit that flared at the ankles over his black leather cowboy boots, open down the front to show off a prodigious belly from decades of rough living. Purple waist-length cape with a high collar, and who wore a cape anymore these days? Golden belt that would have set a professional wrestler's teeth on edge with gaudy jealousy. The sunglasses. The hair. The freaking sideburns, for fuck's sake.
If he might have been Elvis, there was no question in Hope's mind that he was thoroughly undead. Zombie? Perhaps, although instead of going for brains like any sensible zombie would have, he was chowing down on a plate of greasy fries doused in sausage gravy with a handful of grated generic cheese on them—another indication that he was in fact Elvis. He wasn't a pale-faced vampire, neither sparkling nor catching on fire in the afternoon sun leaking through the blinds of Yancy Cleveland's Tavern, Microbrewery, and Rock Shoppe in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. That was the name of the town, and an apt description it was for a few ancient buildings that aspired to ghost town status. There was the Post Office and Rock Shoppe, the Authentic Jewish Delicatessen and Rock Shoppe, and Hope suspected even the police department had a rock shoppe buried somewhere inside by the single-bed drunk tank.
She'd run out of car passing through town. Some people ran out of gas, or had a breakdown. Hope's car had sputtered and died three miles out, and when she'd stepped out to inspect it, the parking brake had failed and the thirty-year-old Plymouth had rolled gracefully down the embankment to flip into a box canyon. It had taken with it every worldly possession of Hope's except for the Catholic schoolgirl costume she'd worn the night before when dancing at one of the Indian casinos, and thirty-eight dollars in singles. She could have had a couple hundred if she'd given that one guy the lap dance he kept asking for, but that would have led to the kind of trouble Hope had decided to avoid.
Hot, sweaty, dusty from the road, she'd walked into Yancy Cleveland's in search of a cold brew and a ride out of town. Instead, she'd found Undead Elvis sitting in the corner, smoke curling from the cigarette clutched in his bluish fingers, with a deck of bicycle cards still shrinkwrapped on the table before him.
"Hey there, Li'l lady, come on over here and sit down a spell," he'd said.
Sitting had turned into talking, talking into drinking, and drinking into poker. Undead Elvis was an interesting fellow, full of stories and reminisces about the Good Old Days before he'd taken one or two or ten too many pills and wound up facedown in his own crapper. He wasn't very good at cards, and Hope wasn't about to tell him she could see the reflection of his hands in his sunglasses. So far, she'd taken him for fifty bucks and felt optimistic she could clean him out and maybe buy somebody's junker to get her out of Nowhere and as far as Raton, where she'd been promised steady work.
When the world ended, she had four Kings and Undead Elvis was trying to work two pair: aces and eights. It would have been the perfect Dead Man's Hand, except he had the red aces instead of the blacks. There were forty-eight dollars in the pot. Hope finished her mug of piss-warm Dos Equis and took a deep draw from her Virginia Slim Ultralight. The hearts and diamonds in Undead Elvis's hand reflected backward off his sunglasses and she wondered just how far she could push him with this hand. "Raise ten bucks," she said to him, then, to the bartender, "Another beer."
Something passed through the world, as if it were at the end of a whip and someone cracked it.. It ruffled Hope's straw-blonde hair and made the sequins on Undead Elvis's jumpsuit dance. Glass shattered behind her and she looked back at the bartender, who'd been the only other person in Yancy Cleveland's.
He was gone.
Beer glugged onto the floor from where the bottle had broken on the bar.
Hope turned back to Undead Elvis. "You better not have looked at my cards."
"I wouldn't dream of it, Li'l lady. Uh-huh."
"You see where the bartender went?"
"Away."
"So, like, to the back?"
"No." Undead Elvis leaned back from the table and rested one blue-green hand on the curvature of his gut. "One second he was there, pouring your beer, and the next he wasn't there at all."
"He went away when that thing happened?"
"Uh-huh."
"What was that thing, anyway?"
"I dunno. Felt kind of like the end of the world."
"How would you know what the end of the world feels like?"
"I dunno, but I bet it felt kind of like that thing."
"You going to raise or call?"
Undead Elvis adjusted his sunglasses, almost uncovering his eyes, and pulled his cards a little closer to his chest. "The world might have just ended, and all you care about is forty-eight dollars, Li'l lady?"
"Fifty-eight, and ten to you unless you're going to raise, you undead bastard."
He smiled at her. His teeth were dazzling white. "Now, that ain't no way for a sweet young thing like you to talk."
Hope sighed. She was ready to be done with this no-horse town. She'd quit after this hand and leave Undead Elvis, Yancy Cleveland's, and Nowhere with all its little Rock Shoppes as far behind as she could get with what little cash she had. "Shit or get off the pot."
Undead Elvis set a crisp ten dollar bill atop the pile in the center. "I call."
Hope grinned and laid her hand on the table. "Read ‘em and weep. Four, uh …" The cards on the table were not the ones that had been in her hand a moment ago. They weren't even regular playing cards. A seven of blue circles. A five of orange triangles. Something which she could only call the P of green circles that featured an image of a burning man. A symbol she couldn't even name in red. And an ace of, apparently, multicolored squares. "What the hell is all this? These aren't my cards."
Undead Elvis put down his cards, showing a similar mishmash of unfamiliar types, colors, and symbols as well. "Well, that's peculiar."
Hope pointed to one of his cards. "The F of… Hell, I don't even know what that's supposed to be."
"I think it's called a fleur de lis."
"I don't care what it is. What did you do with the cards?"
"I didn't do anything. One second they were the regular cards…"
"And then the end of the world happened, and they changed." Hope rubbed her nose. "What the fuck, Elvis?"
"Language."
"Yeah, yeah. So how come we didn't change?"
"How do you know you didn't?"
Hope started to get up from the table, stopped, and grabbed the pile of money. "I'd have won this. I had four kings before… before whatever."
Undead Elvis shrugged. He was a walking corpse; what did he need the money for, anyway?
On her way across Yancy Cleveland's, Hope noticed the Miller High Life clock on the wall no longer had hands. It still made ticking noises, but gave no indication of the time. She'd worry about the time later, and ducked into the bathroom to check her reflection.
She still looked like a stripper dressed in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit under a windblown mop of blonde hair. She turned on a spigot, intending to splash some water on her face, but instead of water, a stream of sand poured out. "What the hell?" She touched it with a tentative finger. It was cold. The hot water spigot rewarded her with another stream of tepid sand. She watched the grains spiral down into the drain and listened as they tinkled through the pipes below.
She had a horrible, frightening thought that Undead Elvis might disappear on her while she was in the bathroom, and hurried back out into the bar. He might have been Elvis, might have been a zombie, but he was still the only person she knew here.
When she emerged, he was standing behind the bar, pouring her a new glass of beer. "Find anything interesting?" he asked.
"We've got hot and cold running sand in the bathroom."
"Huh." He handed her the beer. The cool g
lass sweated like it had been in a freezer. His fingers brushed hers as she took it. They were cold like a corpse's. "Maybe the water went away when the world ended."
"Stop saying the world ended!"
Undead Elvis shrugged. "Drink your beer. Might be the last one for awhile."
She did so, and rounded on him. "What are you doing here anyway? You're supposed to be dead. You died thirty years ago."
He shrugged again. "Seemed like the place for someone like me to be." He went up onto his toes in a classic Elvis pose. "Uh-huh."
Hope shook her head. "This is just too weird for me. I'm out of here." She stalked to the door of Yancy Cleveland's and flung it open.
Beyond, instead of the dusty main street and Rock Shoppes of Nowhere, New Mexico, she saw nothing but sand dunes for miles and miles in all directions. She shrieked and slammed the door shut. Her heart hammered as she opened it a crack to peek out once more. Still nothing but sand. A few grains dislodged from a nearby dune to roll down and trickle beyond the threshold of Yancy Cleveland's. Shrinking back from them as if they were infectious, she turned to Undead Elvis. "It's gone. It's all gone, out there."
He struck another classic Elvis pose, up on his toes and arms spread wide. "It's the end of the world. Uh-huh!"
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