Let Go

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  The scene was like something out of Lucille’s crazy horror books. The books he’d begun reading to help keep Lucille around, the books he’d even kind of begun enjoying.

  A police car braked and swerved, the tail end, with a stink of burning rubber, sliding around to block the road. The cops got out, drew their guns, and crouched beside the driver’s side, using the car as a shield. They took turns popping up and firing, but Everett couldn’t see at what.

  Then the bloodied man at the window turned toward the noise and began to shamble off. One of the cops, the one nearest the rear tire, seemed to catch sight of the movement and shouted for the man to stop. The man kept moving, though, and the officer opened fire. A slug tore through the man’s shoulder, and Everett watched as blood and bits of bone and pink tissue exploded out of the man’s back, but the man didn’t fall. No, he kept walking. Another bullet passed through his belly, and still he kept walking.

  “This is impossible,” Everett said.

  The man was nearly on top of the car now, and the policeman stood up and took careful aim. The back of the bloodied man’s head exploded, his skull whip-cracking back as he finally fell, finally stilled.

  The policeman collapsed, too, pressing the side of his gun to his face, his shoulders shaking.

  “Jesus,” Everett said. “Okay, look. We need to get away from the windows. This is stupid to be so close. If one of those bullets goes astray…”

  He stood, holding his hand out to the young couple. “Come on. Let’s go back. It’s safer in the back.”

  As he helped the girl to her feet, and then the boy, he saw a pair of raw, bony digits rise up in front of the window, seeking out the brick sill’s edge. The hand was short a few fingers, the bloody stubs tapping against the glass. The crown of a head appeared, the hair clotted in a thick black sheen, and then a face. The nose had been torn away, and the cheeks were a pulpy mess. His lips were gone, revealing objectionably white teeth that opened and shut of their own accord, a loose string of frenulum dangling from the stripped gum of his lower jaw.

  It was the policeman, the one Everett had seen trip and fall only moments before. He was somehow still alive.

  Not alive, Lucille said, the echo of her voice in his mind sound and sure. She was convinced of what was happening, and he believed her. Trusted her.

  The policeman was standing tall now, looking into the restaurant with too-large, too-white eyes.

  “C’mon, then,” he said, the couple both on their feet again. “We’re going to the back.”

  Everett hadn’t noticed the crowd of loose-skinned old-timers at the edge of the dining room. They stood well enough away from the windows, but the way they were all bunched up made passing difficult. He caught snatches of their worried, overlapping speculations as he huddled with the couple, passing them through.

  “It’s that Zika virus. I been hearing about that all over.”

  “Glenn Beck said the Rapture was coming. Listened to him on the way over. Ted Cruz was on there, talking about how we’re due for a holocaust cause we’ve lost our way. Not enough Jesus, and ’cause of the gays getting married. This is what we get now.”

  “It ain’t the gays or Zika or nothing like that,” one man said. He sounded supremely confident, but if he had anything else to offer, Everett missed it.

  “Terrorists then,” the Zika guy said. “Or them Chinese.”

  Gunshots were coming fast and steady. Until they weren’t. The dining room grew darker as a mass of bodies passed the restaurant, a crushing wave of people, deformed and disfigured, shambling by, practically falling over one another. Falling over the police, overwhelming them with their sheer numbers.

  Maddie and Teeg—the tall black chef dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and apron—stood on either side of a pale old woman slumped in a chair. Maddie was helping her drink water, and Everett surmised it was the person who had fainted. A sweaty pitcher of ice water sat on the table in a pool of condensation, and he grabbed two empty glasses from another table and poured for the couple before sitting them down around a table farther back.

  “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Let’s stow that shit,” a thick, deep voice said. The cook. “I can’t let any of you leave now. Too dangerous. You see what’s going on out there, don’t you?”

  “Teeg,” Maddie said. “C’mon. Maybe the back is clear, and we can all leave.”

  “We ain’t leaving,” Teeg said. “We’re on lockdown, far as I’m concerned. I want everyone to move back into the dining room, as far away from the windows as you can get. Come on, people, let’s go.”

  When none of the old-timers moved, Teeg let out a drill-sergeant bellow. “I said, let’s go!”

  That got the old folks moving, if not quite scrambling.

  The front window was crowded with leering faces, an entire row of milky eyes staring inside, watching them, smearing bloodied saliva and dirty hands all across the glass. Everett’s eyesight was bad enough that most of this vision was a fuzzy blur, but right then and there, he’d have given anything to not see it at all, blurry or otherwise.

  “What happened out there?” he asked, turning his attention back to the young couple.

  “How the hell do you even explain it?” the girl said.

  The mascara had buried her puffy eyes in black rings and left long, ashy streaks down her cheeks. Everett thought she would be prettier without all the piercings in her eyebrows and the tiny ring in her lower lip. She wore a baggy Oakland University hoodie, the cuffs of the sleeves badly frayed, presumably because she worried at them with her pointy nails, as she was currently doing. A nervous habit, maybe.

  “I don’t know what happened,” the boy said.

  The young man looked a bit more put together, but one sleeve was bunched up high around his forearm, almost to the elbow, revealing a long stretch of ink that ran from his wrist and disappeared beneath the hoodie. His was a black OU hoodie, the large cartoon face of the school’s Golden Grizzlies mascot prominent across the chest, and Everett guessed they went to school together. The boy’s tattoo sleeve was devoid of color, but the black tones and negative space made the Grim Reaper plain, along with the row of tombstones and skulls rimming the work.

  Kids these days, Everett thought, and he swore he could hear a bit of his father in that sentiment. And when had that happened, exactly? Probably around the time he’d had William, maybe. He should call the boy.

  The boy, he testily reminded himself, was thirty-six. But Everett was at that stage in life when anybody younger than him qualified as a kid.

  “You were running. What from?”

  “What do you think from what?” the boy shouted, waving his inked arm toward the window. “From that, man, from that!”

  “It’s all right now,” Teeg said, taking a chair beside Everett. “Just drink some water. You’re safe in here.”

  Even sitting, Teeg was a tall man, his long arms hanging limply at either side, his fingers nearly touching the floor. And even though he was slender, his deep cannon-fire voice gave him instant command of the room.

  “We’re all safe in here,” he said. He held eyes with one of the cotton-headed men until the retiree nodded, then Teeg nodded, too, as if they’d all come to some sort of agreement. Hell, maybe they had.

  “This guy,” the OU girl said, “I don’t even know where he came from. Like from out of nowhere, right? We were walking down the strip, and we heard this scream. I turned around, we both did, and I saw this guy grabbing a lady.”

  “I thought maybe it was a mugging or something,” the OU guy said.

  “And this guy, he jerked the lady toward him and bit into her throat. Like really bit down hard. Tore her neck open with his teeth, and there was all this blood.”

  “There were more, though. I don’t know where they were coming from. Four or five of them, maybe, and they were snatching up whoever was closest.”

  “And one of them grabbed this baby, and—” Fresh tears ran freely down her fac
e, and she snorted back a glob of snot, palming her eyes. “Oh, God. I can’t even.”

  “So that’s why we were running. I don’t even know why we stopped here. All those police coming, maybe. I mean, the door was unlocked, and it was right here, so…”

  “You did right coming in here,” Teeg said. “Locking that door. Smart thinking. That was good.”

  The OU guy picked up the glass of water and held it in his hands, his fingers tightening and loosening, alternately tapping against the glass.

  “I’m Kara, by the way,” OU girl said. “This is Mitch.”

  “I’m glad you’re safe. I’m Teeg. Can I get you some food? A drink?”

  “Nah,” Mitch said. “Thanks.”

  Kara just shook her head, the tears still flowing.

  “It’s good to see you, too, man,” Teeg said, looking warmly at Everett. “Been a while.”

  Everett nodded. It was all he could do. He struggled to hang on, the weight of the last few minutes hitting him all of a sudden. The fried food sat like an iron weight in the middle of his belly. Then he noticed Teeg’s outstretched hand and took it.

  “I was sorry to hear about Lucille. I’m glad you found your way back here, though.”

  Everett nodded again, his mouth dry and his eyes burning. He was surprised Teeg even remembered him. Surprised but gladdened, his heart heavy. They’d met only a handful of times, but it was sweet Teeg remembered them, even after all the years away and all the faces in between. Everett felt guilty he’d barely remembered Teeg until today, hadn’t thought of the man at all, really. And here was Teeg, remembering both him and Lucille, remembering even her name, and holding onto a condolence for three long years.

  Christ.

  If Teeg was a mind reader, Everett wouldn’t have been surprised. The chef reached over and, with a surprisingly strong grip, squeezed Everett’s shoulder and, with his other hand, gave him a pat on the arm.

  Maddie was bussing the tables, refilling water glasses. He watched her work for a moment, tracking her back through the swinging door to the kitchen. A moment later, she was back out and hitting up the tables she’d missed. Neither time had Everett noticed the bustle of activity in the kitchen, not like before, and he wondered why Maddie was filling water glasses and not the Mexican boy who’d greeted him at the table.

  “You seem suddenly short-staffed,” he whispered to Teeg.

  The chef’s brow crinkled, his mouth subverted into a deep scowl. He spoke softly, his words meant for Everett’s ears only. “Lost a few bodies,” he said. “Just me and Maddie now.”

  “Jesus.”

  “These two brothers, see, Philippe and Javier—busboy and short order—worked for me, decided they didn’t want to hack it. Thought they’d be better off running. Took a bunch of knives and bolted out the back door before I could stop them. Wasn’t too long later, they was screaming.”

  “Jesus,” Everett said again.

  “S’why I don’t want y’all leaving if I can help it. Not yet. Not till it’s safe.”

  “We can’t stay here forever.” The voice came from somewhere in the back, behind Mitch and Kara so Everett couldn’t see who it was. Teeg’s voice had been soft, and Everett thought it unlikely the man had heard, but he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the old geezer had heard them, or maybe he was just awfully prescient in his timing.

  “Police’ll get it sorted out” came a soft-voiced woman’s answer.

  “We’re not going to be here forever,” Teeg assured them, speaking louder now to address everyone. “Just long enough to wait it out. Please, everyone, just take your seats for a bit, okay?”

  The old-timers were compliant, and soon the scraping of chair legs against the linoleum was loud enough to blot out the noise of fingers drumming noisily and hands slapping loudly against the window and door.

  “I gotta get cooking,” Teeg said, rising from the chair with a groan. “Who’s hungry?”

  Nobody said anything, but he wasn’t fussed. “Once y’all start smelling the food, your stomachs’ll get grumbling, don’t you worry. I’m making it on the house. We’re all in this together, may as well eat.”

  Some of them murmured thanks as Teeg passed by a handful of elderly couples on his way back into the kitchen.

  Not sure what else to say to Kara and Mitch, Everett slowly walked back to his table, keeping his eyes averted to avoid meeting those staring, dead gazes ahead. He wished he could blot out the sounds they made, the fleshy thunks against the windowpane and the growling, hungry sounds that went with them.

  Absently, he resituated his ID and credit card in his wallet, slipped that back into his butt pocket, and slid into the booth. His knees and back protested slightly with achy twinges, and he let out a sigh of relief as he settled comfortably into the worn-out vinyl.

  He closed his eyes, a pain in his chest blooming. This wasn’t the way to die, damn it. Not like this. Not at all how’d he planned it or wanted it.

  But no, it wasn’t a heart attack but an attack of sadness and revulsion laced with dire, black humor. The absurdity of it, to have his long life felled by something straight out of an overripe horror cliché. There were still things to do. His job, for instance. He sorted mail for the post office, nothing glamorous, but it was his job, and he felt a sense of responsibility toward it. This was to be his last week, after all. Retirement was right around the corner.

  And then what?

  As he dug in his coat pocket for his cell phone, the backs of his fingers brushed the gun tucked in there, along with the Kindle. Ah, yes. What then? He’d already started thinking about that.

  He couldn’t imagine the shape of his life anymore, all the things that had passed and how little was left ahead.

  Lucille was gone. His son had his own life, his job, his own family, in a different state. William visited for the holidays, usually, his wife and daughter in tow. Thanksgiving every other year, and Christmas. The occasional phone call, but those had grown more infrequent over the years. Lucille’s death had brought an uptick in William’s calls, but as time marched on, they settled back into their infrequent groove. Everett could have called him, he knew. Should have called him, in fact, but he hid behind the idea that he wasn’t a phone guy when the simple truth was that he was merely lazy and stubborn. William had inherited that much from him.

  And soon he wouldn’t even have a job anymore. What would he do all day? Sit around the house, watching bad, mindless TV and reading e-books? That wasn’t a life for him. Whenever he imagined it, it felt hollow and meaningless. He just wanted Lucille back; he missed her so much. So he’d begun thinking about the ‘what thens’ of retirement, of another cornerstone of his life being chipped away and tossed into the dustbin of his personal history, and he began to feel as though he knew the answer, and he carried it with him always.

  The cell phone woke with a finger tap to the screen, the big white numerals of the current time set against the manufacturer’s default wallpaper.

  A few moments later, William answered with a breathless, “Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

  “Hello, son!” Everett found himself smiling, tears forming a burning, standing puddle that he had to blink away. Somehow he knew this would be the last time he’d speak to his boy. “I just wanted to check in, make sure everything’s okay on your end.”

  “Yeah, things are good. How are you holding up?”

  “Ah, you know. This weather.”

  Behind him, dead fists slammed against glass. He wondered if more police would come, if there would be more gunshots and whether William would be able to hear them through the phone and worry over his father.

  “It’s only going to get colder. I’m telling you, you should head to Arizona. You’ll feel better.”

  “Maybe,” Everett said. “How are Ellie and Tabby?”

  “Both are good. Tabatha, though, has decided she hates being called”—he lowered his voice and whispered conspiratorially—“Tabby, so we’re all on notice. The fits she throws, Jesus, y
ou wouldn’t believe it.”

  Tabby was three going on thirty and had little trouble making her presence and her demands known to those around her.

  “Oh, I think I can imagine,” Everett said. When William was his daughter’s age, he’d liked to hide under the clothes racks when Lucille took him to the mall, and he proved to be a holy terror who fought against her, literally tooth and nail, when she dragged him out kicking and screaming.

  “Ah, crap. Hey, Dad, I gotta go. Ellie ran to the grocery store for a bit, and the house is strangely quiet. I should go see what Tabatha has gotten into.”

  “Quiet kids are never a good sign. You better go check. Love you, son.”

  “Love you, too, Dad. I’ll call you later.”

  William disconnected first, probably relieved to cut the call short. Everett exhaled slowly. He’d wanted to tell his son one last time how he felt about him, and while it hadn’t been the talk he’d imagined, it was as good as it was going to get. “Good enough” was the best he could hope for. If Lucille’s death had taught him anything, it was that there was always so much left unsaid and never enough time to say it all.

  If he had time, and if William actually called him back, which he doubted would happen, Everett would tell him again how much he loved him. He would apologize, too, for not having been a better father. Everett didn’t think poorly of himself as a parent, and he knew he’d done as well as he could, but always could have—should have—tried harder, striven to be a better father. He had wanted to be a better father to William than Everett’s father had been to him. Mostly he’d been successful, but there had also been too many lapses on his part that could never be corrected.

  If there was time, he’d talk William’s ear off if allowed to.

  Time was such a rare and precious commodity. William’s birth had proven that to him almost immediately. Lucille’s death had driven it home even further, a thick nail through his heart. He’d always thought they’d have more time, that there would be just one more day, and that tomorrow he would be stronger for her, less of a coward. He was going to apologize to her, too. Had meant to, had told himself he would do it tomorrow, before time ran out, but tomorrow turned into tomorrow into tomorrow, and time ran out for both of them.