by T. L. Bodine
…an incident with a staff member.
I find control over my legs and I make it to my feet. I shamble stiff-jointed for the door, none of the pieces of my body moving together correctly. In the movies, they make that herky-jerky zombie movement with camera tricks, but it turns out that all you need is a body that won’t listen to your authority.
“Zoe?” I stop outside her door. It’s so early. There’s no way she’s awake, and I think, why am I waking her up? Is this an emergency? How much of an emergency can it really be for someone to die a second time?
I knock. Wait. Knock again, louder.
A muffled “hmmmph?” from the other side.
“Hey, Zoe. I need….It’s about Dad,” I say, finally finding my voice, trying to dredge myself back into the present, pulled clean of the mire in my thoughts. The words “incident with a staff member” chase round and round in my head like a dog spinning after its tail, an echoing overlay to the image of him dead and open-mouthed on the couch, opportunistic fly buzzing over. “The Lazarus House called. They…I need to go down there.”
A questioning, sleepy noise.
Should I go inside? Should I explain through the door? Should I just leave now and get it over with while she’s gone?
“He’s, uh.” Saying it out loud — having to explain it — seems impossible and exhausting. I realize my hands are shaking. Zoe. I’m going to have to tell Zoe, if not now, then later; there’s no way past this moment. And when I do, she’s going to cry, she’s going to grieve, because Zoe’s emotions all live right at the surface. Because Zoe is tough as hell but she’s not hard, she’s not cold. Not like me. I’ve spent my whole life trying to protect her from things, but the truth is she’d be better at dealing with most of them on her own. “I need to go. I’ll fill you in when I get back.”
“Nnnf.”
“Kay. I’ll lock the doors behind me. If you need anything…” Call Randy, I almost say, but I don’t know whether that’s true, whether that’s even safe. “Text me.”
I don’t think she’s heard any of this, not really. I keep standing outside the bedroom door and hear soft movements, quiet rustling, and then a low snore. I don’t blame her. It can’t be long after dawn.
I grab my keys and splash some water on my face and head out the door.
Chapter 18
I stop at Randy’s apartment on my way out of town.
I don’t mean to do it. My head feels stuffed with bees, a low warm buzzing that blocks out the noise of my thoughts, and I drive on muscle memory alone. I’m parked outside his unit before I realize where I am. I don’t see the Mercedes parked in its usual spot. Maybe he’s out. Maybe he’s talking to the rest of The Underground, trying to get someone else on his side. A replacement in crime.
Maybe he’s parked further up the lot. Maybe I want him to be gone so I can be mad at him.
I get out of the truck and make my way up to his door, driven by inertia. I knock. I try the knob, just to check, but it’s locked.
Something like a low-burning rage sears through my chest. Something wounded and betrayed. He has no way of knowing I’m here, of course, no way of knowing what’s happened or how I feel — but all the same, how dare he. How dare he not be here right now. How dare he ghost me like this and leave me to face this alone.
I knock again, more insistent, and I see the blinds rustle on the unit next door, a pair of suspicious eyes peeking out through the slats. It’s so early, and here I am, pounding on the door like an angry lover. Maybe they think I’m police. Or maybe they’ll want to call the cops on me, figuring I’m up to no good. I don’t know if people worry about the cops showing up in this neighborhood like they do in mine.
I back away from the door, sparing the briefest of glances back to the neighbor’s window. They step back hurriedly, letting the blinds fall back into place. Best not to linger here in case they decide I look too rough for this neighborhood — although, wouldn’t there be some sweet irony in that? But my mind’s racing ahead as I climb back into the pickup, a thought clear and worrying enough to pierce through the persistent hum of white noise that’s blanketed over my thoughts.
It’s hardly dawn.
If Randy isn’t at his place at this hour, then where the fuck is he?
There’s no way he’s left this early to do anything. If he’s not here, it’s because he’s been out all night — I’m certain of that.
So where?
***
The drive out to the Lazarus House is too long to be alone with your own thoughts.
My mind flips between static and rumination, thoughts chasing themselves round and round in circles. I let them go. It’s too exhausting to try to corral them, to impose any sort of order on them. A miserable bone-aching weariness has set in, a kind of deep-set exhaustion that battles against a crawling electric hum that rolls like ball lightning up and down my skin. Like my body’s throwing everything it has at its own broken down machinery, a robot’s weak struggle to self-repair.
Dad is dead.
Where is Randy?
Flashes of things I don’t want to think about: The snap of the old woman’s bone in the grip of the Coalition agent. The sound of the stone crunching through the dried-out bone of Julian’s skull. Javier with a mouth full of blood and gore, looking up wild-eyed from Chuy’s guts. Gail looking like some thin, mangled thing crouched over the body of roadkill in the middle of the highway. Elliot and Duncan, dead on the pavement, gunned down by police.
It’s too much. How much horror can you take in before you can’t handle any more?
The defining category of humanity is resilience. You pick up where you are and you deal — that’s how I’ve gotten this far, how I’ve kept on putting one foot in front of the other, how I’ve managed to navigate when every day is a new disaster. But when does it end? Does it ever end?
Where the fuck is Randy?
I turn on the radio. The station is staticky out here, an in-between place where no radio towers broadcast clearly. The snow overlaid on the music sounds like the crunching white noise in my head.
The last time I felt like this, driving along the road, I crashed my car and died.
I grip the wheel harder, sit up straighter.
I might never have to make this trip again. Dad is dead — dead, fully dead, totally dead — and I never have to make this drive to visit him, never have to roll up to deal with some new drama, never have to make excuses for his behavior. Dad is dead and I don’t ever need to think about him again.
Something wet crawls down my cheek and I swipe at it with the back of a hand. It’s a red-black smear, tears. I didn’t realize I was crying.
Great. I’ll have to get cleaned up somehow before I can show my face at the Lazarus house. I’ll have to work hard to hold back any tears, because as soon as they see this, as soon as they notice the bloody black goo leaking out of my eyes, they’ll have me locked up in a room and I won’t be needing to make this drive ever again after all but for a wholly different reason.
Would they still give me a job, I wonder? Or is that offer only available if they don’t arrest you first?
I pop the truck on cruise control and lean over to paw through the glove compartment, fish out some napkins. I swipe at my face with them, feeling a sudden surge of anger.
Angry at my body for crying. Angry at myself for caring so goddamn much.
I never cried when Dad died.
From the moment I found his body, to the moment I got the call that he’d awoken in the morgue, I felt nothing at all. Just a cold shocked numbness. If I’d had more time, I told myself, I would have been able to grieve. But there hadn’t been time to grieve, not really, not when my life was suddenly so busy with so much else: doctor’s appointments and paperwork and talking to social workers and talking to lawyers and giving Dad his drugs and taking his abuse and finding a job and trying, every day, always, to shield Zoe from all of it.
So I hadn’t cried then.
But it feels trait
orous to cry now.
What am I even grieving for at this point?
You wait too long to grieve and it starts to feel almost garish. It starts to feel like melodrama, some kind of production. If your heart wasn’t broken before, why is it hurting so much now? There’s a time limit to it, a statute of limitations. There has to be, because otherwise once you open that door, when does it ever end?
If you let yourself weep for every injustice, every trauma, every miserable goddamn thing that gets heaped up on you, then you’ll never stop crying. You’ll be like La Llorona in the story, a wailing woman, sobbing forever at the banks of the river between life and death.
I squeeze my my left eye tightly shut, screwing the napkin into it with such ferocity that I’m half-worried the eye will just pop and start oozing jelly. But it doesn’t, and I open it, blinking away the last of the sticky dampness. I shift my grip on the wheel and apply the napkin to the other eye with the same intensity, plugging the tear duct the way you plug up a bloody nose.
I blink again, both eyes clear. I exhale through my mouth, breath hot and dry and rancid in the closeness of the cab. Morning breath is worse when you’re a corpse. I paw through the center console and find a mint, sliding it under my tongue and holding back the roiling disgust as my body recoils at the sugar. But I hold it there and let it dissolve, dry tongue sandpapering along the walls of my mouth, and by the time I get to the Lazarus House, I can pass as presentable.
***
The guards eye me warily as I pull up to the gate.
My heart should be hammering with fear, but it’s all still and quiet in there, dead inside at last. There’s something freeing about it, this disconnect from fear, the separation that’s driven its wedge down between my body and my mind. I’m too tired even for that sick, rotten dread that lives in my ruined guts. I’m just empty.
Maybe they see that emptiness in my eyes. Maybe that’s why they don’t ask me too many questions. Or maybe they’re just not trained for it; shock troops designed to intimidate, not to carry conversations. Lucky me. I give my name and explain my business in a few terse words, broken sentences because I don’t have the energy for a monologue right now.
“Davin Montoya. They called. My dad. Tell them I’m here. I’ll wait.”
Zoe is at home, I think. Zoe is home and if this takes long enough, she’ll be awake and curious, and she’ll want to talk to me when I get back and I’ll have to find the strength for words, so I’m going to save up as many as I can for her. Nothing short of that is worth the effort.
Two armed guards stand outside my car, long rifles slung across their chests. Is this what killed Dad, I wonder? Did he try to escape and get cut down by a storm of bullets? I try to imagine him like that, body cut apart by the impact of a hundred rounds from a semi-automatic, holes spurting red-black gunk, his head arcing back and brains blown clear from his skull like something from the news. I try to think of him bleeding out in the gravel or in pieces on the asphalt, but I can’t imagine it.
I can only think of the way he looked on the couch that day, mouth crusted with vomit, a fly crawling over his unblinking eye.
A guard says something into his radio, and something garbles back, and then the gate’s being opened and they’re gesturing me inside. I drive slow, forced to creep along behind the men in front and beside the pickup. They herd me like a stray calf into a parking space and wait, again, for me to shut off the engine and climb out and head inside.
They lead me past the waiting room, heading down the hallway to the back of the trailer of the administration building. There’s a closed door with a sign - BATHROOM - and a piece of paper pinned beneath reading ASK FOR KEY. They lead me past that to a door at the end of the hall, the master bedroom converted now into an office space, and I realize: This is Ash’s house. It’s the exact same model, the identical blueprint. Maybe they were manufactured in the same place. This thought strikes me as extremely funny, and I have to stuff my knuckles into my mouth to force the laughter back down my throat. I cough to cover for it, and swiftly wipe my hands on my pants before they can see the unnatural hue of the rancid sputum.
The door opens, and they let me inside, closing the door behind me. I listen for the sound of a lock, like this is an interrogation room, like there should be one-way mirrors on the walls and a big steel table. But there’s not. Just regular cheap office furniture, a generic desk and padded chairs like the kind at a bank. There’s a bland painting on the wall, pastel sand glued to canvas in some simulation of a Southwest sunset.
The man on the other side of the desk seems familiar somehow, but I can’t place him. Maybe I’ve seen him on the news. He’s an older guy, wisps of hair combed carefully over the bald spots, bits of shiny scalp visible beneath. He has long sideburns and a bare face that’s the same width as his neck, like somebody added some accessories to a pencil eraser to make a puppet.
“Mr. Montoya,” he says, but doesn’t extend a hand.
“Davin,” I say. “Mr. Montoya is my father.”
He lets that hang there, like he’s waiting for me to be embarrassed or to acknowledge the irony. But we just stare at each other, and he clears his throat.
“Sit. I know this must be difficult for you.”
I don’t sit. I stand, arms at my sides, and watch as he pulls out his own chair and folds into it. He folds chubby hands in front of him on the desk. There is a paper beside him, carefully stacked and arranged with a pen on top, staged for signing.
“What happened?”
“My name is Alan Decker,” he says, ignoring me. “I’m the acting general manager of this facility, and I’d like to extend my greatest condolences to your family on the loss of —”
“Acting manager,” I say. “So you’re sitting in on someone else’s job. Where are they?”
“Please sit,” he says, and I think I can make out an imperceptible little twitch in the corner of his eye. “The Lazarus House is restructuring, actually. There’s an acquisition in the works. But keep that one under your hat, would you? We’re not quite ready to reveal all the details to the public.” He winks, tapping his forehead, as if sharing this makes him my friend.
“My dad.”
“Of course, yes. Again, I really just want to say how deeply sorry we all are. The safety and wellbeing of our patients —”
I grab the back of the chair and lean forward over the desk. I don’t usually use my height for intimidation, but I hope I’m looming. “Cut the shit. Just tell me why you called me here.”
The corners of his mouth twitch down. His frown lines crease deeply through the fat of his jowls, doing nothing to reduce his resemblance to a puppet. “There is paperwork that must be completed. Official death records for the Undead Registry, a release form for the ashes, a waiver of liability…”
“Aren’t you, though? Liable? Isn’t that your entire job?”
“The waiver is a formality,” Decker says, and I’m almost impressed at how good he is at talking right past questions. “Or, I should say, more of a reminder of what you already signed. Surely you recall when your father was brought here?”
I think back. It’s a little hazy, remembering the details, considering a few hours later I was lying dead in a river.
“At any rate, it’s all very standard. We provide the greatest possible standard of care, but our patients do pose some unique challenges. It’s a very uncertain world, handling the Undead. We learn new things every day.”
“Challenges.” I push back from the desk, crossing my arms, cradling my permanently broken ribs so he won’t hear them creaking and grinding as I straighten. “What did my father do? Did he try to escape again? Attack another guard? Just cut the shit and tell me. You don’t need to hold my hand.”
Decker blinks, his head wobbling like he’s been slapped. His brow furrows. “Oh goodness, no, no, Mr. Montoya. Whatever violent end you’re imagining…oh no. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”
“There was an incident,” I sa
y, pronouncing the word carefully, scathingly. “That’s what I was told on the phone.”
The furrow deepens, but his eyes go hard, that mr-buddy-nice-guy persona sliding right off his face. “You were misinformed, and I will talk to the employee responsible. Perhaps she was confused. I am very sorry for the distress that must have caused.”
Now it’s my turn to blink, incredulity stirring some kind of life back into my guts. “Then what happened?”
He hesitates, holding up his hand as if in a gesture of careful consideration. “It’s what we might call, a failure to thrive. We’ve been seeing it more frequently. Undead quite simply grow resistant to the Lazarus and, eventually…” he shrugs.
“I’ve never heard of that.” I’m surprised to hear the anger in my voice. “Excuse me, but that’s a bunch of shit. First people say that if you don’t take Lazarus then you go crazy. Now you’re saying if you do keep taking it, it just…stops working? And then what?”
“And then, well…think of it as like being on life support.”
“Life support doesn’t kill you unless somebody pulls the plug.”
“…you are absolutely correct. My apologies, that was a bad metaphor.”
“Or that’s exactly what you meant.”
“Mr. Montoya, I’m going to need you to sign these papers.”
“Let me see him.”
“That is not possible. The body was sent to the crematorium this morning.”
The room seems to rotate around the edges, like the floor is slowly turning. I hug myself tighter, afraid that I might lose my balance if I let go, afraid that I might launch myself across the room and do something that I’ll regret with my hands if I let them loose. “You can’t do that.”