The men shook hands. Then, with the mayhem down the street out of sight and now apparently out of mind due to the wager, Charlie’s face sprouted a wide grin. Probably the first since returning from the bar earlier.
“Even though I’m enabling you, those Andrew Jackson’s are all mine, Old Man.”
Knees popping loudly, Duncan crouched down. “How do you figure? The clock’s been ticking for five … maybe seven minutes already. You, my friend, are giving back some of that rent money.”
It’s all yours anyway, Mr. Winters, thought Charlie. Win, win. He wagged his head subtly and said, “No. There will be no first responders on this one. Because they’ve all got their hands full with the hooligans and injured cops downtown.”
Duncan said nothing. The key was where it was supposed to be: underneath a clay planter, home to a cluster of tiny cacti. His knees groaned in protest when he stood. He opened the door with the key and cracked it a hands-width.
“Hellooo. Aunt Matilda? It’s me, Duncan.” Save for an incessant low-timbre buzzing coming from the back of the shotgun-style layout, there was utter silence. “Anyone home?” He looked around the entry. It was home to a rolling grocery cart, old newspapers stacked in a pile and, at eye-level to the left—hooks filled with different styles of coats necessary to combat Portland’s weather, which was ever-changing from the end of September through July 4th.
Duncan sensed Charlie crowding him in the foyer and then felt a tapping on his shoulder.
“Shoes,” Charlie whispered.
Sure enough, suggesting Tilly was somewhere in the seven-hundred-square-foot house, on the tile floor beside the stacked newspapers were the woman’s colorful New Balance sneakers.
Duncan nodded and stepped under the arch dividing the foyer from the rest of the living space. In the front room were a pair of chairs and a small sofa. All three pieces were in floral prints nearly matching the drapes. Unlike the stereotypical widowed elderly woman, Tilly was not a cat lady. Hence the furniture was not clad in see-through vinyl and the area rugs and runners covering the wood floor were immaculate—free of fur and not a stray thread showing.
No sirens, thought Charlie, already counting his winnings, which were going to go in the envelope anyway.
Duncan took another couple of steps inside and looked around. Nothing seemed amiss. However, the dozen or so plants in the self-proclaimed—and proud of it—greenthumb’s care that were scattered throughout the front living room and small eating nook seemed to be thirsty and forlorn, their leaves drooping over side tables and windowsills.
Not good, thought Duncan, feeling a tiny flutter in his gut, as if leathery bat wings were brushing his insides.
Pushing the notion that something wasn’t right from the forefront of his mind, he pushed deeper into the house where the air was still and warm. He paused by a small table awash in light spilling in from the south-facing windows. On the table was a pile of unopened junk mail and beside the assorted envelopes was a shallow plastic box the size of a sheet of printer paper. Above a hinge on the see-through pink box the days of the week ran left to right, Sunday through Monday, spelled out with raised letters.
The kitchen was next and as soon as Duncan crossed the threshold he caught a whiff of something sickly sweet he at first attributed to spoiled food his aunt, the consummate recycler, had no doubt forgotten to transfer outside to the wheeled composter.
“Tilly?” he called.
Nothing.
The low-muted humming they had detected when they entered the bungalow was now more of a raucous buzzing noise that, best-case-scenario sounded kind of like a box fan in dire need of a shot of WD-40, or worst case scenario, a trip to the curb on trash day. Either one, Duncan figured he’d be taking care of before the day was done.
Cocking his head toward the noise, Charlie whispered, “I don’t like this one bit.”
“I don’t either.” Duncan looked at his watch. “Because I’m ninety seconds away from losing a hundred bucks.”
Charlie’s knowing grin was lost on Duncan as he pressed on through the kitchen and stopped before Tilly’s bedroom on the right. The door was closed and the noise was coming from within. And hanging in the air of the tiny hall that fed to a bathroom on the left and was capped by a door leading outside to the backyard was the same spoiled meat pong Duncan had detected in the kitchen.
Feeling the chill in his stomach migrating up his spine, and starting to fear the worst, he verbalized his wishful thoughts. “It’s gotta be something deep in Tilly’s trash or some meat lodged in the sink trap.” He looked at Charlie for a second opinion and got only a blank stare.
The current running up Duncan’s back sprouted tendrils that worked their way around his ribcage. With gooseflesh now breaking out all over his body, he reached for the smooth brass knob on Tilly’s bedroom door. After taking a deep breath and tightening his grip, he turned the knob slowly clockwise and pushed. The door swung inward unimpeded. However, instantly Duncan was hit in the face and upper body by a black form escaping the room. He stood his ground as the reptile part of his brain analyzed the threat and in a fraction of a second dismissed it for what it was: hundreds, if not thousands of flies startled and sent fleeing in unison for the light-filled doorway. Duncan raised his hands to his face and exhaled the breath he’d been holding since entering the rear of the house. His first action parted the shiny black cloud, the second sparing him from inhaling a mouthful of the winged pests.
While the black mass was fleeing the room, the bedroom door continued its slow swing and the near pitch-black interior was slowly revealed in little snippets. First the armoire against the left wall was awash in light. Then Duncan noticed the bright inch-high sliver of light coming in under the thick blackout curtain over the room’s only window, which happened to be open a fraction of an inch at the bottom. Finally, barely visible in the gloom and turning smartly back and forth atop a pole with a wide base for stability he spotted a large diameter fan droning on at the foot of Tilly’s bed. The bed pushed against the right wall was a double-sized item covered with floral print sheets and wrapped by a duvet cover that brushed the floor. On the bed was a body-sized lump hidden under a cheery yellow sheet.
By the time the door finally came to rest against the wall to Duncan’s right, he was at the side of the bed and fully convinced the stench now permeating every room in the bungalow was coming from a corpse festering under the sheet an arm’s reach away.
Swallowing hard and holding his nose, he turned and brushed past Charlie—whose jaw was just dropping after coming to the same startling conclusion as Duncan had.
Batting loitering flies from his path, Duncan stalked through the house. The screen door screeched as he stiff-armed it open and expelled that initial carrion-scented breath from his lungs. With tracers and stars popping in front of his vision, he hinged over and planted both palms on his knees.
He was drawing in a second glorious lungful of fresh air when again the screen door screeched and banged and Charlie was there on the small porch matching him in posture, also gasping for fresh air.
Chapter 19
Outside the little bungalow in Ladd’s Edition the hills were not alive with the sounds of sirens as Duncan had suggested. Instead, Charlie’s dry heaves were accompanied by muted screams coming from the direction of Hawthorne three blocks away.
Ignoring the wager as well as the shrill animalistic warble that could have come out of either a man or woman, Charlie wiped a strand of spittle from his mouth then said, “How long do you think Tilly has been dead?”
Duncan went to one knee and plucked the rolled-up newspaper off the threshold where, presumably, the delivery person had left it. He removed the rubber band and unfurled it. Holding it two-handed and squinting at the fine print on one corner, he replied, “This is the Saturday paper. Morning edition. What day is today … anyway?”
“Saturday,” said Charlie, slowly. “All day long.”
“Then Matilda has been dead since yest
erday morning at the latest.”
“And you know this how?”
The screaming rose in volume. There was not just one voice now but a chorus of pain-filled wails, and like a sonic wall it seemed to be moving closer.
Brows coming together in the middle, Duncan cast a troubled gaze down the narrow street. “I got a look at her pill box when we were inside. Yesterday’s A.M. slot was empty. I’d be willing to bet the farm that the newspaper atop the stack inside the foyer is the Friday edition and Tilly’s already made mincemeat of every crossword puzzle in the thing.”
“I want none of that action,” Charlie said. “So you’re saying Tilly missed taking her pills last night.”
Duncan nodded. “The rest of the compartments for the month are still full.”
“So what do we do?”
Duncan plucked his phone from a pocket. “This your first dead body?”
Charlie shrugged.
After tapping out the police non-emergency number from memory, Duncan hitched his shirt over his nose and went back into the house. He made his way to the bedroom where he tugged on the sheet, exposing Tilly’s upturned face. Her features were frozen in a knowing look, eyes closed and lips curled up at the corners, as if she had been privy to some insider info before leaving the earth. Maybe her light at the end of the tunnel had been something other than the train Duncan was expecting the day he drew his final gulp. Whatever the reason, Tilly’s final affect was a far cry from the death masks worn by the young soldiers—living and dead—that he had plucked out of rice paddies, from within crowded jungle LZs or off of remote mountain firebases all muddy and bristling with splintered trees and crushed vegetation.
With the phone still pressed to his ear and going unanswered at police dispatch, Duncan tugged at the other end of the sheet, exposing Tilly’s stockinged feet and bare legs up to her knees. She had gone to bed wearing khaki walking shorts. Shifting the phone to his off-hand, he pressed down on the mattress where it met her legs and saw angry purple bruising running along the undersides of her calves. Though all of his knowledge of postmortem bruising had been gleaned from Matlock and an occasional episode of C.S.I. name-that-town, it was enough to confirm that she’d been dead for some time. There was no reason for him to guess how long. That would have to be determined by the real pathologist—not the armchair, TV-schooled variety.
After what could have been twenty rings or fifty—he hadn’t been paying close attention—he ended the call, thumbed in 9-1-1 and hit Talk.
This time he counted the number of warbling trills assaulting his ear as he walked back out to the porch. Nine rings total until the connection was made. Then he listened to a recording telling him all about “high call volumes” and urging him to “hang on the line” before offering assurances that a “dispatcher would be with him as soon as possible.” Lastly, causing a grim smile to crease his face, the same voice urged him to think through the nature of his call and, barring a truly life-threatening situation, hang up and call police non-emergency.
Exasperated from hitting nothing but dead ends, Duncan snapped the phone shut and motioned for Charlie to follow him back into the house. And as they hauled open the screen door, releasing another flight of trapped flies, the screams from the direction of Hawthorne were back and seemed to be growing nearer.
***
A handful of minutes after reentering Tilly’s house they emerged for the final time, Charlie in the lead and laboring with his end of dead weight. They carried her body over the threshold and set it gently on the porch. It was wrapped in the yellow sheet and, for good measure, a thick mothball-scented comforter they had found in a bedroom closet. Thankfully the harsh chemical smell leeching off the fabric somewhat countered the sour stench of soft farts and burps randomly escaping her dead body.
But the double layer of treated fabric did nothing to deter the voracious insects that had followed them through the door. Flies dove and landed and skittered into the folds, no doubt searching for somewhere to lay their larvae.
Thank God she wasn’t a biggie, thought Charlie as he picked up his end again. “Me first down the stairs?”
Duncan showed him his open palm. “Give me a sec,” he said and flipped open the phone and hit redial. Heard nothing this time. No recording prompting him to second-guess the kind of help he needed. No push a certain digit to connect here kind of choices were offered. There was only a soft hiss, like he imagined outer space might sound like. He tried his brother in Utah again. Same story—lights out and nobody’s home.
“Nothing?” asked Charlie.
Duncan closed the phone slowly. Spun it on his palm, thinking.
“Not even a ring tone this time.” He leveled a concerned gaze at Charlie.
“None of that all circuits are busy crap?”
“Dead air.” Duncan grabbed his end of the comforter. “We can’t leave her here. With my back and knees … you better go first.”
And Charlie did go first. Backwards down the stairs and in charge of the end with Tilly’s head, which he didn’t want to drag along the cement stairs all the way to the sidewalk. So he concentrated fully on keeping his fingers locked with the fabric, and his upper body ramrod-straight.
And the attention he was giving the task at hand was why he didn’t see the narrow bike tire crossing behind him as he negotiated that final step down to the sidewalk.
Also deep in concentration, Duncan had been trusting Charlie to steer as he watched his own foot placement on the stairs.
There was no forewarning from the dazed cyclist pushing her bike in front of her. So the chain reaction caused by Charlie’s tripping over the bike wheel was instantaneous and painful for all parties involved.
Like a string of dominoes, starting with Charlie pitching over backward and losing his purchase on the comforter, they all spilled into a heap.
Tilly’s head did meet cement with an unfamiliar, awful crack.
Still gripping onto the seat and apparently in some kind of a trance or shock, the slender female folded over sideways and became pinned underneath the bike and all of Charlie and Tilly’s added weight.
Midway down the run of stairs, Duncan looked up just in time to see the bike’s front wheel fold over like a taco under Charlie’s backside. Simultaneously he was tugged in the direction his friend was now falling. A half-beat later Newton’s law was in full swing. Things seemed to slow and he was in gravity’s firm grasp, past the point of no return, the fabric torn out of his hands. On the way to a Pete Rose landing atop his favorite aunt’s corpse, he saw Charlie’s mouth form a surprised O and the soles of his boots go vertical to the sidewalk. Shifting his gaze right, he noticed the twenty-something being slapped to the grass parking strip by the back-half of her bike. And strangely, unlike Charlie, her face remained slack. There was no sudden oh shit spark in her eyes. No autonomous gasp of surprise. Her lips were pursed into a thin white line and stayed that way even as she was landing flat on her backside.
Still processing what this all meant, Duncan came to rest lengthwise on Tilly’s corpse. Equal and opposite reaction being what it was, his hundred and ninety pounds sent the remaining gasses rushing from her abdomen and, sheet and comforter no kind of baffle, straight into his face.
Charlie was on his feet first. Though he felt bad about dropping Tilly, his eyes were on the young woman who was laid out flat on her back and unmoving. He edged closer, tentative steps that took him around the top of her head and fan of splayed-out hair. Once on the woman’s left side, he saw that she was bleeding profusely. The high zip-up collar on her white cycling jersey was soaked to nearly black, and below her jawline was a golf-ball-sized divot where flesh had been rent away. Around the wound the dermis was torn and ragged, the exposed flesh raised and three shades of purple. She had on a pair of those quick click in and out biking shoes, black skin-hugging biker shorts, but strangely—no helmet. Her brunette bangs were soaked and plastered to her forehead, the perspiration still visibly beading on the exposed skin.
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“You gonna check her for a pulse?” drawled Duncan. “Or just stand there leering at her cameltoe?”
Cheeks suddenly blushed and rosy, Charlie looked up, but said nothing. Jostling for equal billing in his mind was the inexplicably reawakened biker on Hawthorne, the dead body at his feet, and now, fully overloading his senses, the young woman who looked to be bleeding out in front of his eyes.
“Want something done right,” muttered Duncan as he stepped over Tilly, “you gotta do it yerself.” He knelt by the biker’s head and pressed two fingers against her carotid. “She’s alive. Her pulse is rapid, but a little weak.” Then, riffing on the old nineteen-seventies television show Emergency, added, “Get me Ringer’s Lactate with D5W stat!”
This only confused Charlie further.
Duncan stood, his knees weak and rubbery. “It’s a bleeder alright,” he said. “Whoever got their chompers on her didn’t get the main vein. She’s shocky, but she’ll be fine. Help me lift Tilly.”
Working together, without a word spoken between them, Duncan and Charlie got Tilly’s corpse into the Dodge’s load bed. Duncan worked the comforter free and closed the tailgate. As the retention chains rattled and clanged against the sheet metal he suddenly became aware of how what he and Charlie were doing must appear to anybody looking on. Nodding at the bicyclist, he handed the comforter to Charlie.
“Wrap her with it and make sure she’s still breathing.”
Charlie nodded and went about the task.
Duncan turned a three-sixty, taking stock of every visible window, upstairs and down, on all of the houses running up and down both sides of the street. Finishing the slow pirouette, he heard the subdued hiss of radials on concrete and low rumble of a finely-tuned engine.
“She’s OK,” Charlie called. “Shivering … but OK. You should try to get help on your phone again.”
“No need,” Duncan called back. “Five-Oh approaches.” He stepped off the curb and stood by the rear wheels of his pick-up, nearly in the path of the approaching cruiser. It was one of the newer Dodge models painted white over royal blue and trimmed with gold accents. Low-slung and wide of fender, it was the pit bull of police cars. And perched on the roof was a minimalist light bar and a half-dozen sharply angled needle antennas. He waved his arms and then quickly wished he hadn’t. After all, there was a corpse wrapped in a sheet in the back of his pick-up. To further complicate explaining that, a young woman, victim of some kind of attack, was lying beside the old pick-up’s front left wheel. All total, it didn’t look good for he and Charlie. Probably the only thing that could make this scenario harder to explain to the officer was if Duncan had a faux cast on one arm and the pick-up was a blue panel-van with a loveseat angled out back. It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) Page 10