by T. L. Bodine
“I heard all that. I just can’t see what it has to do with me.”
“What it —” I cut myself off before I say something I know I’ll regret. I clamp my teeth together so hard I can feel the roots shifting in my gums. “If there’s something shady going on in there, if they’re doing something bad…”
“You mean worse than picking people off the street and locking them up? Jesus, Davin, you don’t have to go hunting for a conspiracy here. It’s a detainment camp. It’s already bad.”
“All right. Fine. So the Lazarus. What’s your point?”
He exhales, a long bracing sigh, and then draws a rattling breath. Sometimes his voice rasps, caught in the closed-up places where his throat was crushed by the rope. It’s gotten steadily worse since we went off the Lazarus. “Okay. Let’s think about it for a second. We know that going off Lazarus doesn’t make you go crazy or lose your mind, because we’re all fine. But to hear you tell it, this Julian guy looked like a mummy in — how long?”
“Two months,” I reply, not liking where this is headed. “I don’t know how he died, though, it might’ve…”
“Davin, unless the dude died from being packed in salt and left in the desert, I think it’s probably pretty safe to assume that any…dessication…is happening because he’s off Lazarus.”
I sigh. He has a point.
When he speaks, his Southern accent is peeking through his words, the way it does when he’s tired or excited or upset, when he loses his careful grip on enunciation. “What I’m sayin’ is, great, maybe we ain’t killing folks and eating their guts. But we’re not exactly a hundred percent, are we? I know I’m feelin’ it, and I’ll bet you’re feelin’ it too. Like your body is falling apart.”
I know exactly what he means. Being on Lazarus doesn’t exactly feel like being alive, but it’s a hell of a lot closer than what we’re at now. I’ve never felt deader than I do today, and yesterday was worse than the day before. Every day is another slow spiral toward inevitable decay, and I know it and recognize it even if I don’t want to admit it. Seeing Julian looking the way he does, seeing an in-the-flesh example of just why that group was calling itself The Dusty Bones? It’s horrifying.
But what’s the alternative?
Going back to being a criminal? Living every day in fear of being rounded up by The Coalition? Taking the risk of injecting a dose and losing my mind like Javier?
“Look. Lazarus might not be necessary for maintaining our humanity,” Randy is saying. “But it sure as shit seems necessary if you don’t wanna end up as a dried-out husk. And call me vain, but I think that’s pretty fucking important.”
There’s something accusatory in his voice, like he’s daring me to argue, but I don’t have it in me to fight. The fact is that I don’t know the right answer here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, no better than he does.
Chapter 9
Friday comes at last, capping off what’s starting to feel like the longest week of my Undead life — which is saying something. But Friday isn’t about me, it’s about Zoe, and the Underground, and achieving some semblance of normalcy in our routine, and I’m pretty committed to making that a success.
“You ready?”
“Just a sec.” Zoe’s perched on the edge of the couch, glasses sliding down her nose as she leans forward to watch the TV intently. She’s wearing her favorite t-shirt, a faded emblem of a decayed hand thrusting up from the earth in a triumphant fist. “Have you been keeping up with this at all?”
I follow her gaze to the TV screen, where a black woman is being interviewed. The news-scroll caption beneath her name reads: Shaniqua Jones, mother of the deceased. The camera cuts from her to a scene inside a living room. Maybe it’s a trailer, or an apartment — it’s hard to tell for sure. But it’s small and cramped, shabby furniture crammed into the dim space.
Taking up most of the center of the room is a long table — the kind of folding table you find in a church, thick plastic standing on thin fold-out legs. There’s a bed sheet on the table, and laying on top is a teenage boy, probably Zoe’s age or a little younger. He’s wearing nice clothes, Sunday best, and his hands are loosely folded over his chest, his eyes sunken behind closed lids, mouth a colorless line. His dark skin has gone ashy with death, and there’s something weird about his limbs, something bloated and swollen — lividity, the blood pooling from gravity and a heart that’s long stopped beating.
A scene like that, you’d expect him to be surrounded by flowers, but there are none. Just some candles burning, flickering in glass hurricane vases.
The camera cuts away again. I reach for the remote, curious, and turn up the volume.
“…for eight days. No known reports of Undead returning after more than three days have been documented. Neighbors have issued a formal complaint, citing unsanitary living conditions as the body has begun to noticeably decay.”
The camera changes now to a neighbor, another black woman with a toddler slung on her hip. The little girl has a pacifier in her mouth and is staring boredly off screen, but her mother is focused with laser-like intensity on the camera.
“It’s not that I don’t sympathize, because I do. I love my babies. They mean the whole world to me. I’d be devastated if I lost them. But it’s like, girl, you got to know when you’re done, and that boy ain’t coming back.”
The camera cuts away again, back to the reporter, a white woman with windswept hair and a tweed jacket, bundled up against autumn cold in some climate far from New Mexico. “While Shaniqua’s case is perhaps the most dramatic, it does speak to an emerging trend. The CDC reports that fewer new Undead have risen this year than had by this point in the two years prior. The exact cause for this decrease in number is unknown, but scientists are speculating that new regulations governing Undead containment may play a role. Scientists acknowledge that it’s too soon to be sure, but this unusual pandemic may have begun to run its course. This could be promising news for Governor Lynch’s presidential bid, which has so far made a strong case for revising the policies surrounding treatment and citizenship of Undead…”
I switch off the television.
Zoe turns to look at me, brows lifted. “Remember what Adrian said?”
“Let’s get going,” I say, realizing that I have so much to tell her now — about Julian, about the Lazarus House, about Chuy — and not knowing how to begin sharing something that big. It can wait until after the party, anyway.
***
We car-pool to the coffee shop because having too many cars in the lot after hours would be too suspicious. Randy insists on driving, so we’re in the Mercedes, Zoe squished into the back seat and my knees pressed up into the dash. There are blood stains, long since dried, in the passenger seat, black-brown memories of when he picked me up off the side of the highway. There’s a bullet hole, too, in the side panel, from that night where everything went wrong with Javier.
Randy could afford to fix these things, I’m sure, but he doesn’t bother, for the same reason that he lets the trash pile up in the floor board. Because Randy likes to have nice things and neglect them; because suicide didn’t work for him, but self-destruction is a hard habit to kick. We don’t talk about it, but I know what self-loathing looks like.
All the same: It is a nice car, and it might actually be a little roomier inside than the truck.
CJ’s is mostly dark by the time we pull up. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the place was abandoned. The sign on the front door says “Closed Early for Special Event” in looping, spidery handwriting, and the double glass doors are locked. But the back door is open, a rectangle of yellow light visible beyond the dumpsters, and I pull the pickup into a space in the gravel back lot.
Ash is outside smoking when we arrive. The cigarette cherry glows in the gathering dark, and he casts a long shadow beneath the dirty yellow bulb lighting up the back door of the coffee shop.
We pull into the dirt lot and I tell Zoe to go on inside without us so Randy and I
can have a cigarette before we go inside. She does, but not before stopping to give Ash a hug, as if this were a normal family get-together, as if it didn’t mean anything at all that all of the important people in her life were corpses.
Ash is an older guy, sort of our group’s de facto father figure. Unlike the rest of us, he died of natural causes, some kind of cancer, or maybe it was mesothelioma. You’d assume it was the smoking that did him in, but it was actually breathing in industrial waste through a lifetime of construction work. He didn’t start smoking, he told me once, until after he’d died — because at that point, why not? The nicotine doesn’t do much, but it gives a little hint of a buzz, a ghost of the effects of Lazarus. Or maybe it’s not even the nicotine. Maybe it’s the formaldehyde. They pump that into bodies in the morgue, right?
I haven’t seen Ash since our Lazarus supply dried up, and though he doesn’t look as bad as Julian, he isn’t looking great. His skin has a weird, brittle quality to it, yellowed and translucent like the outermost layer of an onion. Patches of his scalp are visible through his thinning gray-blond hair, and I can see broad dark liver patches staining the skin. He can’t be much older than fifty, but he looks ancient now, as wizened and brittle as if he’d been alive for a century.
But he smiles when he sees me, and my heart aches at the sight because he could be my father. He’s just about the right age. And, in a way, he’s taken on that paternal role for all of us here in The Underground. When Randy found me on the side of the road, freshly resurrected and caked in mud and gore, it was Ash’s house he brought me to. When we found out that the Lazarus was drying up and we were all facing withdrawal on our own, it was Ash who tried to give us reassurance. And now here he is, giving birthday hugs, being present, planning a goddamn party. It’s not fair, and I guess I should be grateful for this family I’ve fallen into in death, but all I can think about is Dad’s incoherent rambling, the way his room looks like a prison cell because he always has to ruin anything he touches.
“Hey Davin, Randy,” Ash says. He stamps out a cigarette with the toe of his shoe and reaches to light up another. “Been a while.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I say. “Time has been kind of getting away from us. How are you holding up?”
He shrugs. “Well, I ain’t dead yet,” he jokes.
“We might have some good news in that department,” Randy says, lighting up a cigarette and handing it to me before lighting up his own — a habit he’s had as long as we’ve known each other. I take the cigarette he offers and before I can say anything he continues: “Davin’s made some new friends who have a Lazarus hookup.”
Goddammit. I should have known that Randy wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t wait for me, wouldn’t even talk to me about this before bringing it up and dragging Ash into it.
“Is that so?”
“I don’t know,” I say, hurriedly. And, before Randy can continue trying to tell my story for me, I lay it out in broad, swooping strokes: Seeing Gail in the desert, following her to a camp, meeting a group who said they were getting Lazarus from the source — whatever that means. “But honestly, they weren’t exactly the friendliest bunch. They would have said anything to get rid of me. Probably the guy was blowing smoke up my ass.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Ash says, resting an elbow against the wall below the light, cigarette still dangling between his fingers. Something about the pose and the shadows shifting across his features makes him look like a character from a 1940s film noir. “So you found a group of Undead out in the desert, and at least some of them claim to have escaped from the Lazarus House, yet somehow they’ve still got access to drugs that none of the rest of us can get?”
I nod. “It sounds far-fetched, right? And they’re a whole freak show. Missing pieces, advanced decay. One guy looked like something out of an old monster movie. Practically a mummy.” I feel a twist of guilt for describing them like this. But I feel a protective urge, a desire to keep those Undead in the desert away from The Underground — although I’m not really sure which group I’m protecting. Maybe both of them. Maybe they’re just two worlds that I don’t want to overlap.
Ash’s brows lift up, surprised at this detail. He glances at Randy for confirmation.
He shrugs. “I wasn’t there. I couldn’t tell you. But I think it’s worth looking into. You can’t tell me y’all ain’t the slightest bit curious?”
“It’s all pretty weird,” I admit.
“They sound like a rough bunch,” Ash says, voice soft and thoughtful.
Randy doesn’t say anything right away. He’s frowning at the gravel underfoot, the scatter of ashes from several spent cigarettes. “Davin, you go up to the Lazarus House all the time — have you ever seen anybody in there who looks like those guys?”
“No.” I think of the old woman with her hang-dog face. I think of the toddler I saw there once, tiny body purple and swollen. Chuy, looking alive enough to keep coming to work, his guts held in place with a girdle. I think of my dad, curled up on his bed like a snail. “But it’s not like I go poking around in every room.”
“Maybe we should.”
I blink at Randy. He looks back at me, gaze even, and gives a little shrug. “Best way to find out, right?”
“There’s no way,” I protest. “For one, they’ve got security all over. You’re not going to be roaming around there without supervision. For another, they’re tightening it even more. The last time I was there, they said they might stop allowing visitors entirely.”
Chuy might let us in, I think, but I don’t dare say it. I don’t even want Randy knowing that Chuy’s still walking and talking. Considering we’re part of the reason he’s now a member of the Undead, I don’t know if he’d be willing to put his neck out for us a second time — and I don’t know that I’d ever want to ask him.
“I mean. It’s the only way to know for sure what’s going on, right? Seeing is believing.” Randy smirks, a sly glint in his eye. “And it’s the only place in town that still has Lazarus, right?”
I look uncertainly between him and Ash. Ash looks away, the way you politely turn your head and change your focus when you overhear people arguing and don’t want to get dragged into it.
Randy says nothing, challenging me with his silence.
“No. No way. We’re not…we’re not criminals, Randy.”
His brows lift.
Dealing Lazarus was different, I want to say. Reallocating prescriptions was not at all the same as breaking into locked doors or bribing officials or stealing from the source. But I don’t know whether that’s really true. And no matter what, we are all criminals — every last one of us from The Underground has an illegal freedom.
Before anyone can say anything, Zoe pops her head back through the coffee shop door. “Are you guys coming in or what? We’re partying without you!”
Relieved at the interruption, I stub out my cigarette and head inside.
***
CJ’s is a combination of coffee shop and gift store. The front half of the shop has novelties for browsing, a bar for ordering, and a few scattered tables. The back half, though, is all partitioned-off booths, private areas for discussion or study. Students come back here sometimes after school. There’s probably an aspiring novelist or two in Los Ojos who comes to prod at their laptop. But mostly this meeting space is for us, the members of The Underground.
I don’t know exactly how or why Delilah came to own the coffee shop that acts as the town’s unofficial Undead meeting place. She’s a Breather, so it’s not like she’s got personal stake in Undead rights or anything. But she’s an old hippie type, New Agey but in a cool way — maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s just a rebellious spirit looking for something to latch onto.
When I go inside, Delilah is setting a birthday cake on the table. It’s small, because there’s only four people it needs to feed: Zoe, Delilah, her granddaughter Jo, and Ash’s wife Lilith. Seeing them there, clustered around one end of the tables that ha
ve been pushed together banquet style, it strikes me how fortunate we are to have any allies at all. The Underground is small, but half of us are Breathers, and maybe that means something.
“About time!” Zoe says, looking up. She’s grinning, her face flush with excitement. “We were waiting forever. Where are the other two?”
“We’re here!” Randy calls, coming in behind me. He teases: “What, you’re not done yet? Damn. Guess I better go outside again.”
I hear footsteps, the door closing behind Ash. All present and accounted for.
No hint of the tension from outside follows us into the room, and I feel a rush of gratitude. My hand moves on its own, reaching for Randy’s, and our knuckles brush, but he pulls away to investigate the celebration. Zoe’s at the head of the table. Delilah and Lilith flank her, stand-in maternal figures. Jo is bringing in plates from the kitchen. Her girlfriend, Andrea, trails behind with mugs of coffee balanced precariously on a tray. Andrea’s one of us — one of the Undead — and you can see the hints of decay in the lividity of her pale skin, the whispers of discoloration that mottle the inside of each arm. But her hair is clean and shiny, tied back in a high blond ponytail, and she’s smiling as she sets a fancy whipped-cream-adorned coffee in front of Zoe.
I don’t remember the last time we had a birthday party this big. It’s possible that maybe we never did. Ours was never a big family; we didn’t have a lot of cousins or close aunts and uncles like a lot kids around here. And growing up, neither of us had many friends. It was hard, with Mom’s off-and-on bouts of illness, with Dad’s erratic alcoholism. For a long time, the family was just me and Zoe, a couple of kids against the world, basically orphans no matter how dead or alive our parents might be.
“Well, that can’t possibly be right,” Randy says, pointing at the candles. “There are clearly fewer than 17 candles on this cake. Are these cheapskates trying to short-change you?”