by Shaun Hamill
But of course I couldn’t tell my wife that without admitting to a whole boatload of other things I’d kept from her. So here we were, in Texas, where she wanted to involve the Fellowship, and couldn’t quite understand why I didn’t. Both of us in my nephew’s bed, she with her frowning dreams, I wide awake.
I knew I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. I got out of the bed, got dressed, and found my phone. I texted Kyle:
How about a late-night tour of Zombie Mansion?
His answer came almost at once: Give me thirty minutes.
3
I waited for Kyle on the front lawn. The night air was cool and humid, the grass still wet. It put me in mind of the ever-present humidity in Leannon’s world. I couldn’t escape that feeling of being observed, like the whole street was watching me.
“Are you out there?” I said, not sure to whom the question was addressed. “Can you see me?”
The street gave no answer, but the sense of being surveilled didn’t recede. When Kyle’s Prius pulled up, I wasted no time hopping in.
“Do you want to talk?” he said.
“No.”
He turned on the radio, and we drove across town to my family’s old warehouse. My first glimpse of the building was partial, illuminated by Kyle’s brights: a hulking monument whose former gray exterior had been painted over with an elaborate mural. Gray and blue zombies wandered a hellish postapocalyptic landscape of ruined, smoky buildings, crashed cars, skeletal playground equipment, and a burnt-orange sky. It looked like the world’s most elaborate piece of van art.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Donna hates it,” he said, “but I wanted to make a strong first impression.”
“It does do that,” I said.
We got out of the car, and he pulled a six-pack of Shiner Bock from the hatchback. I took a bottle while he unlocked the building. The Styrofoam skull from the Wandering Dark days was gone, and the guest entrance had moved to the other end of the building. We walked into the warehouse proper, where the workshops, offices, and break room remained more or less intact. He turned on the power from the “control room.” The building lit up around us, and I experienced a heartsick pang. I finally felt home.
We left the rest of the six-pack in the break room fridge and went outside again, to the guest entrance, a black door at the top of a ramp. We drank beer as Kyle walked me through the attraction.
“The idea is that you’re part of a group of survivors trying to navigate a city full of zombies,” he said, as we walked down a narrow alley between two fences. Behind the chain-link on either side sat old, junked cars and rough suggestions of storefronts and office buildings. “So you have a bunch of ‘infected’ milling around on both sides, and they seem to be minding their own business, when suddenly an uninfected woman runs up on your right and starts begging for help. That gets the attention of the infected, and they swarm over the barrier, and sirens start blaring, and all bets are off. Not really, but you know what I mean.”
The rest of the attraction consisted of a series of increasingly high-risk encounters with the undead. Visitors crawled through tubes, ascended steep ramps, and had to help each other across wide gaps. It was more intense than anything we’d ever considered during our ownership, a ropes course from Hell.
“Donna wanted to give people a reason to exercise,” Kyle said, as we shuffled through a red plastic tube on all fours, careful not to spill our beer. “Like we’d be doing a public good.” We emerged from the tube at the base of a wide, steep ramp with ropes tied to the top. We chugged our bottles empty and began our ascent.
As we made our way deeper in, the challenges grew more demanding and conversation ceased. My heart pounded and my clothes stuck to my body. I kept waiting for that familiar feeling, that strange mix of unease and excitement that signaled the onset of a trip to the City, but it never came. With each new challenge, each turn of a corner, I remained beside Kyle. We swung between elevated platforms, crossed monkey bars, and edged along balance beams at what seemed like unsafe heights. By the time we shot down the slide that deposited us at the exit, my lungs burned and I had a stitch in my side. I was also, for the first time in a while, completely blissed out. I lay on the mat at the bottom of the slide, breathing hard and letting my mind reel through nothingness.
When I came back to myself, I got up and followed Kyle back to the employee break room, where we finished the six-pack.
“Thank you,” I said, when I caught my breath. “I needed that.”
He clinked his bottle against mine. In the silence, temporarily free of anxiety, something occurred to me.
“Hey, do you have anything left over from The Wandering Dark?”
“We left the old monster labyrinth in place,” Kyle said. “It was useful for moving zombies around.”
“What about costumes?”
“We zombified most of the clothes,” he said. “Cut them up, made them ragged and bloody.” He stood, and I followed him to the costume shop. He pointed at a pile of cardboard boxes in a corner. “Stuff we couldn’t use is in there.”
I opened the box at the top of the pile. I pulled out a rumpled brown suit coat, a frilly blouse with shoulder pads, and a pair of cutoff jeans. I recognized each item, small pieces of my past, long forgotten, but they weren’t what I was looking for. I dug through more boxes.
“If you tell me what you’re after—” Kyle said.
But I found it in the fourth box, stuffed in by itself: patchy brown fur of varying shades, looking old and cheap in the bright lights, robbed of the dark majesty it possessed in its natural habitat. My second skin. My monster suit.
“I should have guessed,” Kyle said.
I looked it over. “You didn’t do anything to it.”
“Of course not. It’s yours. Messing with it would have been wrong. Anyway, what do we need a monster costume for at a zombie mansion?”
I held the costume in my lap on the drive back, running my fingers through the tousled, matted fur. I felt a little more whole than I had an hour before.
“Is it all right if we stop here?” Kyle said, pulling into a Walgreens parking lot. “I promised my dad I’d bring him some pinworm medication.”
I followed him inside, where he found the medicine and we joined a surprisingly long checkout line. After about two minutes of listening to the woman at the head of the line debate the wording of a coupon with the cashier, the cashier directed us to the open pharmacy counter in the back. There, a bored-looking woman in a white coat rang up people’s purchases. Something about her face—the way she held her mouth, as though sucking on sour candy—snagged on my memory, but I couldn’t quite place her. I let it go and played on my phone as we trudged toward the register.
“Noah? Noah Turner?”
I looked up. The woman was half-smiling at me.
“Yes?” I said.
The smile bloomed. “It’s been a long time,” she said. She pressed a hand to the name tag on her chest: HI, MY NAME IS BRIN. Brin. My sister’s first and only girlfriend. Brin, who had broken Eunice’s heart so completely that Eunice had leapt into a suicidal depression. Fucking goddamn shitting Brin.
“I remember you, Brin,” I said.
Her cheer faltered. “I heard about Eunice and your mom. If there’s anything I can do—”
“You can ring my friend up,” I said. “We’re in kind of a rush.”
Her gaze dropped, and I felt a brutal satisfaction at this small cruelty. Fuck her. I could tell Kyle was curious, but I pretended to be engrossed in my phone as he dug out his debit card and paid.
“What was that about?” he said, as we left the store.
“Is it okay if we don’t talk about it?” I said.
“You’re the boss.” He unlocked the car, but before we could climb in, Brin jogged out of t
he store, coat billowing behind her.
“Hey!” she called.
“Want me to get rid of her?” Kyle said.
“I’ll handle it. Wait in the car.” I met Brin halfway across the lot. “What do you want?”
“Look, I understand why you wouldn’t want to talk to me,” she said. “The way I treated Eunice was inexcusable. And what came after—” She rubbed a hand on her face. “It’s the single biggest regret of my life. Religion—especially the weird kind, which is what I had—is a hard thing to get out from under. It can talk you into all sorts of stupid, cruel behavior. It can make you afraid of yourself, and instead of dealing with that, I made it Eunice’s problem.” She touched her face again. “It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. I always wanted to reach out to Eunice someday, but then I heard she got married and had kids. I don’t know. I thought I still had time to make things right.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” she said. “If you or your family need anything—well here, let me give you my number.” She pulled a pen and paper from her lapel pocket and scribbled it down. She started hurrying back inside as soon as I took it from her.
“Brin?” I said.
She paused.
“I wish I was brave like you,” I said.
She waved and then disappeared back into the store. I climbed into the car.
“Everything okay?” Kyle asked.
“Fine,” I said.
We drove to the trailer park where Kyle’s father was living, a flat, grassless concrete grid named Meadow Lake. Kyle asked if I wanted to come with him to the front door.
“Dad would probably want to say hi if he knew you were in town,” he said.
“No thanks,” I said, trying not to sound rude.
I watched from the passenger seat as Kyle climbed the cinder-block steps to the corrugated metal box containing his father. When Daniel Ransom answered the door, I was momentarily taken aback. He’d become a dazed, shrunken, slumped man with wispy white hair, dwarfed by pajamas that were far too big. Life had not been kind to him, and I felt a moment of something like pity. It passed.
I looked away, focusing on the piece of paper Brin had given me. My face burned at the thought of going back to Eunice’s house, sleeping in her son’s bed, and pretending to be as clueless as everyone else.
4
Megan was still asleep when I returned. Exhausted, I fell into bed beside her and finally slept. I dozed straight into the following afternoon, and woke only when the sunlight through Dennis’s bedroom window became impossible to ignore. I went downstairs and found the family in the kitchen. Hubert was scrubbing dishes at the sink and handing them to Dennis to put into the dishwasher. Caroline and Megan sat at the kitchen table, Megan drinking coffee and Caroline reading a thick paperback. Her red hair obscured much of her face. She looked so much like Eunice that I felt a little sick to my stomach.
“Good afternoon,” Hubert said. “There’s coffee if you want it.”
“Sure,” I said, moving to the pot to pour myself a mug.
“Rough night?” Megan said. The words hit me like a baseball between the shoulder blades, and it took effort not to hunch in reaction.
“Yeah,” I said. “Trouble sleeping.”
“Same,” Hubert said. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”
I took a seat at the table with Megan and Caroline, my mug cupped between my hands. “What are we up to today?” I said.
“Not much so far,” Hubert said. “We were just trying to decide what to do with the rest of our afternoon and evening.”
“I want to go to the zoo,” Dennis said.
Caroline looked up from her book. “Are you joking? Why would you want to visit animal prison?”
“Animal prison?” Dennis said. It had apparently never occurred to him that animals might not want to live at the zoo.
“We don’t have to go to the zoo,” I said. “We can go to a park. Or a movie.”
Caroline stood and grabbed her book. She walked out the door to the backyard and slammed it behind her.
Hubert leaned against a counter and crossed his long, skeletal arms. “She’s having a hard time. I’ll talk to her.”
“Give her space,” Megan said, sliding into the vacant chair. “Drink some coffee with me. Take a load off.”
Hubert complied, happy to be told what to do. Dennis continued to frown over the idea of an animal prison.
I claimed to have forgotten my phone and ran back upstairs to Dennis’s room, where I parted the curtains and opened the blinds just in time to see Caroline straddle the top of the back fence and disappear over it into the unfinished housing development beyond.
5
I snuck out the front door and took the long way around the block after Caroline. I found her sitting cross-legged on the concrete foundation of what had probably been intended as the first draft of a living room or kitchen. She stood up as soon as she heard me, ready to run.
“I come in peace,” I said, holding up both hands. I moved into the room and left the doorway open, so she could flee if she wanted. It was a symbolic gesture—the open room meant she could take off in any direction she liked—but an effective one. She remained tense but stayed where she was.
I wandered around, looked out between the slats at the unfinished homes on either side. “Do you come out here a lot?” I said.
“Mom and Dad don’t like it,” she said. “They’re afraid we’ll get hurt.”
“That wouldn’t have stopped me when I was your age.”
“Mostly I come to watch Dennis play and make sure he’s safe.”
“You look out for Dennis,” I said.
She nodded.
“Your mom always looked out for me when we were kids. You know you look just like her?”
She still didn’t relax. “How did you know I was out here?”
“Luck,” I said. “I happened to look out the window upstairs and saw you climb the fence.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, with a defiant glare. I didn’t argue, but waited. The indignation gradually bled out of her face. “For a little while, Mom seemed so happy—happier than I’ve ever seen her—but then one day she turned mean. Like whatever we said or did was the wrong thing. And Dad—she was awful to him. She called him weak, and a coward, and said she should never have married him. She did it in front of me and Dennis, like she didn’t care if we heard. And Dad hunched his shoulders and took it until she was done.”
She blinked a few times and swallowed hard, loud enough for me to hear.
“I should be nicer to him,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
“Then she got even worse. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and see her pacing her office with her arms crossed and her head down. I kept hoping things would get better. But then Mom started taking long walks by herself in the middle of the night. Sometimes I would sneak into Dennis’s room to look out the window, and I would see her pacing out here, shaking her head. And then, one day, she and Grandma were gone.”
She looked away for what she said next: “Sometimes when Mom was in her office, I could see something outside the window, watching her.”
“What kind of thing?” I said.
She glowered at me. “A monster in a robe. It looked kind of like if the big bad wolf went out in Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak. Mom never seemed to see it, but I do.” She looked at me, saw something in my face, and then said: “You’ve seen it, too, haven’t you?”
I considered denying it. But I felt a kinship with this kid—she reminded me of Eunice, yes, but also of me. Smart and scared and trying to sort through the half-truths and lies her family had told her up to now.
“I have,
” I said.
“Do you know where Mom and Grandma are?” she said.
I closed my eye, afraid I was going to be sick. This was all my fault. Leannon had warned me years ago, on my wedding night. She’d told me that my request to be left alone wasn’t “how this works.” She’d told me there were things I didn’t understand. And now she’d proven it. She’d taken my whole family.
When I opened my eye again, I found Caroline watching me with grave concern.
“Can you bring them home?” she said.
“I’m not even sure how I would start,” I said. But as soon as I said it, I realized that wasn’t true. I knew exactly where to start. I didn’t have to wait for the City to invite me in again. I might be able to get back there under my own power.
6
I left Caroline in the empty house and walked back around the block. Everyone was in the kitchen when I reentered Eunice’s house, which made it easy to steal Hubert’s car keys from the hook inside the front door and slip out again. I managed to get out of the driveway and down the street without anyone coming out the front door. I drove across town with my phone on silent, unaware of any missed calls or texts.
It was early evening by the time I got to Mom’s house on the other side of town, the sun obscured behind thick storm clouds and bringing on premature night. The house loomed larger than I remembered, seeming both wider and taller, as though it had been growing like any other living thing on a steady diet of whatever houses ate. Its windows reflected the streetlight, like the black eyes of an insect.