She dreamed at some point; he was sure of that. Her eyes moved under their lids, back and forth as her lips twitched. Perhaps she dreamt she conversed with everyone she’d met in her long life. Perhaps her long-dead parents visited her, there at the end. Perhaps they carried the baby in their arms—her older brother—whom they’d lost at four months due to the whooping cough, of all things, like an infant from the 19th century.
Sometime after two, her bowels relaxed audibly, and they believed she’d passed. But she kept on breathing. A licensed practical nurse asked if she should bother to change Mrs. Trent’s diaper. Yes, of course, they said.
Jeff held her hand for hour after hour, hoping that if she ever swam to consciousness for a brief moment that she would be reassured she wasn’t dying alone. He rested his head on his free arm to doze. Once, he was sure she stroked his hair, although that was impossible with him holding her hand.
As the night wore on, her hand and then her forearms gradually became colder. He reached under her bedsheet to feel her feet and found them to be icy as well. But still she kept breathing.
It’s okay, he told her. You can let go now. You can go. You’ve done everything you can for us.
The next morning, sunrise illuminated the frost outside her window until the whole world glowed. That’s when she exhaled one last time and didn’t inhale again. She looked beautiful and peaceful there on her bed, her long white hair fanned over her white pillow. Her nightgown and bedsheet were also white, completing the illusion of an angel. Her jaw relaxed in death, and it fell to her chest in a ghastly expression, so Eddie rolled up a towel and placed it under her chin to close her mouth again.
As they waited for the funeral home to come take her away, Jeff watched the color drain from his mother’s face, turning into a translucent gray. He and Eddie remarked how their eyes played tricks on them as they imagined her lips and eyebrows still twitching.
The next time he saw his mother, she lay in a casket. She wore her favorite purple dress. The mortician’s heavy makeup made her look like a wax sculpture of his mother, not the real thing. They’d brushed and hair sprayed her hair the wrong way, not how she usually wore it. And they’d jammed her dentures crookedly into her mouth.
Jeff reached into the casket and placed a hand on top of hers, clasped over her stomach. Her knobby fingers felt like rubber, but strangely, they felt exactly as they had when she lay dying. He had thought they would somehow feel different now.
The pastor, when he delivered her eulogy, called her by someone else’s name.
And that was only the beginning. Informing her friends and relatives, disposing of her belongings, settling her medical bills, the probate of her will and disbursement of her meager financial assets, all took several months. Sometimes, he heard her voice in the middle of the night and wondered if he was dreaming. Sometimes, he heard her in the static of an ATC radio transmission, and he wondered if he was losing it. Junk mail addressed to her somehow followed him wherever he lived, sticking to him like shit to a cat’s fur. He still received telemarketing calls for her at dinnertime. That was his mother’s ghost: the memories, the mundane consequences, and the footprints she left in the sand of life.
That was his understanding of death, until now. Sad, slow, and exhausting. Not clean and not easy.
Which made the creatures walking outside Sammy’s Grocery utterly alien to him. An obscenity.
On the men’s room wall hung a coin-operated dispenser, selling mints and condoms. One slot sold something called the “Screamer” French tickler. “It’ll make her a SCREAMER,” a sign said. “Ear plugs not included.”
He started to laugh. In a few moments, he wasn’t sure he could stop.
But he did. His laughter dried up in his throat when he heard someone screaming in the main room.
He threw open the bathroom door to hear Jimmy Owens’s voice. “Oh my god. Oh my god!”
Jeff tore across the store, already hoisting the shotgun to his shoulder. But he slowed down when Jimmy met him coming the other way. “Jeff! Hurry!”
Danny appeared and ran with them down Aisle One. They stopped at the medicine racks, where young Emily Rooter lay on the floor. Saliva foamed out of her mouth to catch in her stringy blonde hair. She stared fixedly at the ceiling.
Jeff quickly absorbed the other details. An open box of Maximum Strength No-Doz caffeine pills lay beside her, and a blister pack of pills lay beside that, showing at least a dozen of them had been popped out. Emily had washed them down with the overturned bottle of Gatorade spilling out beside her.
More significantly, he noticed the mother, Rachel. She stood coolly to the side: arms crossed, expressionless. Watching her young daughter die.
She’d meant for it happen. She’d been the one to pop the pills out. Had to have been. No. Why?
“What did you do?” Jeff hardly recognized his own voice. “What did you do?”
He knelt beside the girl and wrenched her head backward to open her airway. That done, he jammed his fingers into her mouth and attempted to clear away the vomit.
“Come on, kid. Come on.”
He sealed his lips over hers and blew into her lungs.
A wispy young girl downing all those caffeine pills. How would you poison someone, quickly, if you had to? he once asked Paula. It was at the conclusion of a murder mystery on TV in which he’d called a cowboy six-shooter a semiautomatic. Paula had squinted and internally consulted her pharmacological background. Pure nicotine mixed into a cocktail would be one way. Another would be to overdose them on caffeine. Five minutes, tops.
Five minutes. How long had Emily and her mother been back here by the medicine display?
Jeff continued mouth-to-mouth. He hesitated and then started to tear off the girl’s shirt so he could begin chest compressions.
Danny touched his back. “Jeff, no. It’d be pointless. She needs a hospital, and we can’t get her there.”
Jeff stared into the child’s face for a long time. He clasped her hand, like he did his own mother’s. It wasn’t cold yet, but it soon would be. Her bones felt small, like a bird’s.
He looked up to see everyone had gathered around. For once, Criswell didn’t wear a sneer on his face.
The girl’s mother smiled. “Everything’s going to be okay now. I saved us.”
Jeff let go of the girl and slowly stood up. Saved us? It didn’t make any sense. How could this girl’s death possibly save them from zombies? The room spun and darkened around the edges of his vision. “You killed your daughter. You didn’t save anyone. You killed her!”
He’d never hit a woman in his life. Until now.
Her cheek cracked under his palm. Red hair flew around her face as the smack turned her away.
She stayed that way for a moment before tucking her hair behind her ear. Her exposed cheek was already reddening. She looked down at the floor, a kind of meek acceptance that made Jeff wonder if she was used to being hit. And despite everything, he regretted what he’d done.
He couldn’t move as the woman stepped around the group and shuffled away. His gaze fell to the inert body of the child at his feet. The other men crowded around and did the same. In a cruel way, that was the first time he felt a connection to them, knowing they all felt the same depth of shock and horror.
“Oh, no,” Criswell said—but his voice didn’t come from nearby. He wasn’t standing with the others anymore.
Jeff turned in time to see Rachel Rooter pull open the front door. She no longer wore her black-and-white dress with the cigarette burn on the lapel. She didn’t wear anything.
Criswell had followed her part of the way, but now he just stood by the Aisle One endcap, his axe lying at his feet. “Help!”
Jeff’s paralysis broke, and he ran for the door. The others—even Criswell—followed him a moment later.
But Rachel Rooter was already outside, having walked in her bare feet half the distance to the zombies clustered near the pile of mulch bags.
Jeff reali
zed he’d left his shotgun on the floor by the girl. No time to go back for it. He would have to run out there and grab her.
But that was when the blue light returned. This time, it sizzled across the environment and through their bodies like an electrical current. Gasping, Jeff staggered and grabbed the edge of the door when he felt the strength leave his legs. Toby’s spear clattered to the floor behind him as he dropped it and doubled over.
When Jeff recovered sufficiently to raise his head, he saw that the woman had reached the zombies. She looked pathetic standing there in her nakedness, arms raised to Heaven.
Bearded old John Swales was the first zombie to claw into her bare skin. Mac was the second. She only screamed once. It’ll make her a SCREAMER, Jeff thought as his sanity twisted like a broken wind chime. Swales and Mac soon grasped her internal organs in slimy fists and pulled them out across the asphalt like taffy. Then the other zombies crowded around, thankfully concealing her from view.
Jeff looked up to see Criswell standing beside him in the doorway, watching the carnage. The others clustered behind them. The dark tuft of hair under the actor’s lower lip trembled as his mouth hung open.
Death’s never easy, Jeff wanted to tell him, but that would make him an authority on death, and he didn’t know anything at all. After tonight, death would never be comprehensible.
“Come on.” Jeff pulled him back inside and slammed the door.
Chapter 18
CRISWELL
If he needed any more evidence the apocalypse had arrived, then he got in the form of the redheaded mother being ripped apart like a hamburger piñata.
That meant he should feel free to return to his original reason for coming to this cesspool of a grocery store. One more violation of the Koran couldn’t matter at this point, not that he had more than a passing guilt about religion to begin with. The six-pack of Corona he’d tried to purchase still sat on the checkout counter. Tuning out the chorus of shouts around him (“Oh my god!” “Did you see what she did?”), he pulled a bottle out of its cardboard carrier. It was warm now, but he didn’t care. But then he realized he didn’t have a bottle opener.
His older brother, Youssef, would tell him, as always, Serves you right for trying to drink alcohol. And then Youssef would add, as always, By the way, Maliki, did you remember to pray today?
No, not once, he would answer, as always.
Then I will pray for you.
He never did understand why Youssef became such a dogmatic Muslim. They immigrated with their parents from Saudi Arabia to L.A. when they were babies. They attended American schools, ate American food, and dated American girls. They united together against their parents’ strict ways and resisted speaking Arabic at home. When their parents finally saved enough to make a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, the brothers refused to accompany them.
The last thing their parents said before boarding their plane was, We will pray for you.
By all accounts, they never had the chance. Three days into their trip, after checking into the Makkah Hotel of Mecca, they simply disappeared. Police found their bodies over a week later in a trash bin in the port city of Jeddah. They’d been stripped of their clothing and valuables, then garroted, most likely with a rope, although the weapon was never found. Neither were the murderers. Rather than pay to have their bodies shipped back to America, Youssef asked their relatives in Medina to arrange for immediate burial per religious custom.
Youssef reacted to the incident by becoming a strict Muslim. But Maliki—free at last—dropped out of school, gained a hundred pounds, and pursued an acting career. Youssef admonished him to stay away from pork and porn as he moved to Hollywood.
I will pray for you, Maliki.
“Aha.” He found a bottle opener on Aisle Two, sharing a box with eating utensils on sale for twenty-five cents each. At last, he opened a beer and downed half its contents in three swallows.
Something thumped against the locked door to the storage rooms.
Danny—or, Asshole Number Two, as Maliki thought of him—rested his handgun on the counter next to the beer. “Well, Sammy’s awake.”
No one said anything else. Just stood around looking at each other. Asshole Number One retrieved his shotgun and bowed his head. Maliki turned away when he saw tears in his eyes.
Judging they wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, he took his beer and sat down in the hole behind the checkout counter. Maybe if he closed his eyes, he could travel back to a happier time.
That would be after his parents’ deaths. And it would be before bankruptcy forced him to move back home with Youssef, where multiple daily prayers and no alcohol consumption were household rules. Happiness would fall sometime between two and four years ago, when the late night cable TV show he hosted, Sinful Cinema, claimed nationwide syndication. Maliki’s success occurred in spite of—or perhaps because of—the program’s name, which implied it featured pornography rather than campy old horror films.
During each two-hour episode, he wasn’t Maliki ibn Imran ibn Anas al-Fulan. He was Mal Levolent. “Call me Mr. Levolent,” he said during each introduction in his sonorous voice. He punctuated this with a vain smoothing-down of his 1970s-professional haircut, a primping of his bow tie or moustache, or a straightening of his horn-rimmed glasses. He would then show a classic Hammer horror film like The Vampire Lovers (Sinful Cinema episode 33) or even the venerable Ed Hickory classic, Grave Robbers from Outer Space (episode 79). Every twenty minutes, he stopped for comedy sketches involving his vampiric co-host, Mistress Cinnamon, played by a former exotic dancer with breast implants.
That would be the happier time. The place to stop the clock. He had everything at that point: success, a sexy co-host, and a marriage to a rich and dimwitted society girl who thought Islam was the name of a lion in a C.S. Lewis novel.
Maliki finished his beer. He put the bottle on the floor and tried to fold himself into the space under the cash register. Hold onto that memory. Go no further with it. Hold it, hold it…
Fail.
How could he not remember Cinnamon’s cunning, which unfortunately matched her frontal assets? She used the whole arsenal to get what she wanted, such as a salary and dressing room size comparable to Maliki’s. She even set her sights on Maliki himself, wrecking his six-month marriage to the society girl by feeding her insecurities with unannounced late-night visits to their home. “Men keep staring at my boobs,” she once complained as she sat at their kitchen table, crying into a cup of tea. “I can’t find a man who loves me for me,” she said another time. And the one that really drove Mrs. al-Fulan into the stratosphere was, “I just dumped my boyfriend and need someone’s shoulder to cry on!” Maliki was never unfaithful, but his wife’s accusations and paranoia wore him down. Sometimes—God help him—he fantasized about taking Cinnamon to bed on principle.
Meanwhile, Cinnamon’s fan mail poured in, reportedly thirty emails a day. Compare this to the one or two Maliki received a week (usually to ask how to reach Cinnamon). Facebook fan pages and websites sprang up to follow her. She received constant invitations to be the honored guest of horror conventions, when Mr. Mal Levolent received none. Worse, as she garnered more attention, she paid less of it to Maliki. Maybe she realized by now it was more profitable to seduce Sinful Cinema’s producers than its overweight host.
Maliki had never been good at reading the writing on the wall, so when that writing was reduced to a verbal pink slip from Mr. Head Producer himself, it caught him completely by surprise. “We’re renaming the show to something with more of a ring to it. Cinnamon’s Sinful Cinema.”
The producer was a tall, stick-shaped man named Deshawn. Maliki glared at him. “Look, dipshit,” he said, giving in to his long-running urge to pervert the man’s name, “I made this show. I wrote all the material, I created all the characters, and it’ll be nothing without me.”
“It’ll be fine,” Dipshit said. “You know, I’ve always wanted to dabble at writing, so I’m taking the creativ
e duties over. How hard can it be?”
Cinnamon’s Sinful Cinema lasted only one season without him. As the writing quality plunged, Cinnamon’s neckline kept pace to compensate. But even that wasn’t enough to save the show from audience backlash, and finally, indifference.
Not that Hollywood was knocking down the door of Mr. Mal Levolent. With nothing to add to his IMDb resume except for occasional roles in indie horror films, his clout and bank balance dissipated.
Soon, he was broke. He had to move back in with his brother. Youssef urged him to pray and pray even more. Fast and purify yourself. He encouraged Maliki to apply for jobs at shopping malls. Instead, Maliki visited gun stores to play a mental game. It was called What Is The Best Gun For Suicide?
One day, after a round of that game, he returned home to find an email waiting for him from one Edith Holman. She was co-producing a film for Smith Farm Studios in Nilbog, Virginia. The movie? A remake of Ed Hickory’s camp-fest, Grave Robbers From Outer Space, now just titled Grave Robbers. “We need a lead actor who’s good at cheesy self-seriousness to play the Amazing Criswell. You game?”
Of course he was. By that point, he would’ve done it for free, for the resume entry, but he wasn’t about to let her know that. The one good thing he’d learned in this business was that if you worked for free, you were basically telling the world your talent was worthless. So he negotiated a higher per diem than he normally commanded these days—a full eighty dollars for a twelve-hour shoot—plus all travel expenses.
During pre-production, Smith Farm Studios sent him to an affiliated director in L.A. to film a series of YouTube shorts to build audience buzz. It was the first time he’d donned his new role as the Amazing Criswell.
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 16