“I think he’s been bitten.”
“Hey, Eric,” she said, stepping from the back and into her store. Eric sat at one of the tables, picking at the frayed and stained red and white checked tablecloth with his right hand. His left rested on his .357 Magnum, which lay on the table between the salt and the pepper.
“Miss Misty,” he said, looking up at her. Crate was wrong. Tasgal didn’t look sixteen. Typically more like eighteen, she thought, but today he looked a hard thirty. His skin, usually a healthy pink, was pasty. The flesh around his eyes was dark and puffy. The gauze bandage around his right forearm oozed blood.
“You okay?”
“I need a drink,” he said.
“Some coffee?”
“A drink.”
“Okay” she said. “Rum or gin?”
“Rum,” he said. He picked at the blood-soaked bandage and winced.
“Be right back,” she said.
She stepped past Crate, who stood watching Eric Tasgal with weary eyes. As she left the room, Tasgal said something to Crate. She wasn’t sure what it was.
In the bedroom, Charlie sat rooted to the edge of the bed with booze in his hand and fear in his eyes. She grabbed her rum from the nightstand.
“What’s going on?” Charlie asked, his eyes wide beneath a creased brow.
“He needs a drink,” she said, and left. As she walked down the hall, Charlie turned on the television. From the sound of it, the screaming lunatic with the giant glasses was no longer on. The bell above the door rocked back and forth. Crate was gone, no doubt hunkering down on the bench with Bilbo Baggins at his feet.
“Thanks,” Tasgal said, grasping the bottle of rum by the neck with his left hand. His right hand rested on the table. Misty twisted off the bottle cap and set it on the table. “Double thanks.”
He took a hit from the bottle, just a little one. He made a hissing sound.
“My pleasure, Eric,” she said, touching the back of the chair before her, steadying herself. She wondered if he could tell how drunk she was. “What happened?”
“Beistle is a madhouse,” he said, looking up at her and shaking his head, slack-jawed. “It’s just… it’s just gone.” He extended his left hand toward the chair. “Sit down.”
She pulled out the chair, sat down, and watched as he gathered his thoughts. He stared down at table, and she allowed her gaze to drop to the seeping bandage. There was blood on the tablecloth. Tasgal sighed, and the mother inside of her, the mother she never got to be, wanted to place her hand on his. The wound on his arm—the very fact that he’d probably been bitten by one of those things—dictated otherwise. She would not touch him.
She looked at her bottle of Jamaican rum with a sense of loss, wishing she’d grabbed a glass on the way into the store.
“They’re all dead,” Tasgal said. She looked up from his arm, worried that he noticed her staring at it. He hadn’t. His eyes were on the bottle of rum, which he knocked back once more.
“Everybody in town?”
“God, no,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Jim, Clark, fucking Cardo. Sheriff Kosana. Every cop in Beistle.”
“My God,” she said. She brought her hand to her mouth, mostly because it was what she was probably supposed to do. In truth, the news did not shock her. It saddened her, yes, but shocked? No. She’d watched the news for the past two days. She’d seen the mutilated dead bodies of three people who bought from her several times a week staggering through her parking lot. She was officially through being shocked.
Eleven
“We got the first call, God, was that just yesterday?” Tasgal stared at her, eyes wide, not waiting for an answer. She saw the gears of realization grinding behind his eyes. “No, yeah. Two days ago. I’d just come into the station. Was expecting another day of doing nothing, you know?”
“I know,” she said, suddenly wanting to hear what he had to say. Needing to hear it.
“It started at the hospital. It came through the switchboard as an assault, but by the time I got there, there was more than one report, and…”
He drank a little more rum, and then held the bottle out to her. She shook her head.
“No. You should pace yourself.”
“Gah,” he said, looking at the bottle as if it were a bee that had just stung him. “You’re probably right.”
“I drink a lot of water when I drink,” she said, and just like that they were talking casual. Just shooting the shit.
“Huh?”
“Yeah. No hangover the next day.”
“Huh,” he said, looking around. “There anything to eat?”
“Of course. Cold cut sandwich okay?”
“Perfect.”
“Coming right up,” she said, wishing he’d said a candy bar or a bag of chips would do. Her eyes felt like they each wanted to do their own thing, and she wasn’t convinced that she could make it to the deli.
She managed to get there, taking her time, laughing once when she knocked over some canned soup. She downed a cup of water and made Tasgal a hearty sandwich, piling ham and roast beef and three different cheeses high between slices of home-baked bread. She grabbed a bag of chips from the rack, and served it all up with a cup of ice water.
He downed the first half of the sandwich in silence then looked up at her.
“Mm,” he said, pulling a napkin from the fingerprint-stained silver dispenser and wiping his mouth. A drop of blood fell from his bandage and onto the table. He wiped it up. “God, this hurts.”
“Oh, damn,” she said, hopping up and returning to the table with a bottle of aspirin. She shook two into his hand, and when he asked for more she tapped out three more. He downed them with ice water. He was done with the rum for now.
“I was listening to the radio on the way over here, and let me tell you, I don’t give a shit what some of those jokers are saying. These are dead people.”
“I know,” she said. “You probably saw the…” she nodded toward the front door.
“Yeah.”
“Mark Willits and his two kids.”
“God,” he said. “I saw Connie at the hospital. She was dead. I saw Mark and Junior a little later, I think it was.” He frowned, looking around the room and blinking his eyes. He looked like he was about to pass out. She wondered if it was booze or blood loss that was taking hold.
“Did you lose a lot of blood?” she said, nodding toward his arm.
“No,” he said, shaking his head and looking hard at the rum. “It hurts like a bastard, but it’s not that bad. Still, you know, what the hell does this mean?”
She didn’t say anything.
“I think it’s starting to get infected,” he said, eyeing his right hand curled atop the table like some dead thing. Were the fingertips a little bluish? “Think maybe you can cut it off for me? I’m sure you got something in the deli that could do the job fast and clean.”
She opened her mouth, and that was all. No words came. Tasgal’s smile surprised her. “Kidding,” he said. He frowned again. “I think. And look at this,” he indicated the bottle of rum. “I contaminated your rum.”
“No,” she said, trying to sound as if the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. “It’s—”
“I understand,” he said. “I should have asked for a glass.”
She waited for him to resume his fractured tale, and suddenly she wanted another hit from her rum. She was grateful for the other bottle in her kitchen.
“I watched Mark Willits and Junior pull Nellie to the ground,” he said, and his chest heaved once. She thought he was going to cry. He didn’t. “I wanted to shoot them, both of them. Nellie too, because by then there was no helping her. She was still alive, but, you know?”
Misty nodded once, trying to remember what the news had said about bites. She’d heard so much over the past forty-eight hours, so many conflicting reports, so much confusion.
“By then, I’d already gotten this,” he shook his head. “We were at Proust’s. You know Proust’s,
right?”
“Yeah,” Misty said. Proust’s was a large supermarket owned and operated by Eddie Proust and his family. Proust was a loudmouth and an asshole, and Misty wouldn’t lose any sleep if Tasgal’s tale ended with Proust getting his windpipe eaten out.
“We answered a call there,” he said. “Clark and me. This was after the hospital, I think.” He looked confused. “Wait, yeah, of course it was after the hospital. After the hospital and the funeral home. By then the National Guard was in town. Not a lot of them, and I got the idea that they were just as confused and messed up as the rest of us. Things weren’t holding together all that much.”
The bell above the door rang. Misty jumped, and Tasgal’s hand twitched toward his gun. Crate shuffled in. He saw the looks on their faces and raised his eyebrows, amused.
“More of them?” Misty said?
Crate shook his head, looked at her as if she were stupid. “You should drink a little more,” he said. “Me? I’m gonna smoke. Want some?”
Misty blinked at him.
“What?” Crate asked, half grinning. “You afraid the Beaver here is going to slap on the cuffs if we break out the grass?”
Tasgal laughed once.
“See?” Crate said, and vanished into the back.
Tasgal looked at her, his face scrunched up, trying to remember where he was.
“Proust’s,” she said.
“Yeah, Eddie Proust had a line of about fifty people outside of his store, and he called us out to make sure nobody went nuts and looted the place. There were two of us. Kosana was dead by that point, so things were already falling apart.”
“How?” She asked. She’d had a short fling with Mac Kosana, back when she was young and he was a deputy.
“Some drunk from up in the hills blew his chest out with a shotgun.”
Misty gasped. Despite her earlier feelings, real shock was setting in. Tasgal made sense, but he wasn’t telling a complete story, but what he was saying was real, it had all happened to him. She could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. It was in the air, and she suddenly found herself quite afraid. It was just outside her door, and before long it would be inside, looking for something to eat.
“Eddie had the doors locked, and he was standing behind the glass all horse-faced and stupid, hollering for everyone to get back. His brothers were in there with him, and each of them had shotguns. Hell, I think Ella had one, too. Cardo was in there with him, trying to keep the peace. Talk some sense into the idiot, or something.”
Crate walked back into the room with a joint hanging from his lip, nesting in the fibers of his beard.
“Here,” he said, and handed another joint to Tasgal along with a pack of matches. “On the house. It ain’t shit, too.”
“Thanks,” Tasgal said. He lit up and sucked in, eyes closed. “That’s nice. I don’t do this so much lately.” Crate left and the bell jingled. When Tasgal offered the joint to Misty, she shook her head and waited for him to go on.
“Oh, yeah—sorry.” He shrugged. “Clark and I got separated, and when Eddie opened the doors, everyone rushed in, and then it was just me and Clark, looking at each other. I remember looking around, making sure there weren’t any of those things around, and that’s when the yelling started inside.
“We went in, and Proust was standing there with Keith, um, I’m not sure what his last name is, the little red-headed guy.”
Misty nodded even though she didn’t know who he was talking about.
“That Keith guy was screaming in his face, and everyone else was yelling, and that’s when I realized what was going on. Eddie had hiked prices.”
“Oh, jeeze,” she said.
“Yeah. Through the roof,” Tasgal said. He grabbed the rum and took a shot, followed it with water. “Ah.”
“How’s your arm? Aspirin kicking in yet?”
“I think so,” he said, and held the joint up to his face, crossing his eyes a bit to look at it. “The idiot was asking something like five bucks for a dozen eggs. Two dollars for a can of beans. Like he was in his right mind.” Tasgal shook his head, fell silent.
“What happened?”
“That Keith guy shot him is what happened. Just reached up with a little pea-shooter and popped him right in the face. He dropped, and then everyone with a gun started shooting. I saw Cardo on the other side of the crowd, falling back, and then they charged the exit. I did the only thing I could do. I ran like hell, out of the store and around back.
“Things quieted down eventually, and then they came back and started cleaning the place out. There were a few gunshots inside, but I think they were just shooting the dead ones who were coming back, you know?
“I got back to my car. Clark was sitting in the passenger seat, holding his leg and leaning against the door. He was bleeding real bad. I should have thought, but I didn’t, I just wanted to get the hell out of town. I drove this way for about ten minutes, I guess, passing up those things, passing up people who waved for me to stop and help them. They looked confused, like ‘Where the hell is the cop going?’ and I just kept going, talking to Clark, telling him that he was going to be okay. He’d grunt, and when he stopped grunting, I guess I just figured he’d passed out.”
He shook his head, laughed once. He looked at the bottle of rum as if were someone he didn’t trust.
“Then he sat up and, well, there it is.” He indicated the blood-soaked bandage with his left hand, which shook. “I screamed and emptied my gun into his head.” Tasgal crinkled his nose. He looked like a little boy who’d just stepped on a caterpillar. “He’s still in the car.”
He placed the joint in the ashtray. He considered the forgotten remnant of his sandwich, picked it up, and took a bite.
“You should probably lie down,” Charlie said from behind Misty. She looked back at him. He stood near the door leading into the back, the bottle of gin in his right hand.
“Oh, hey, Charles,” Tasgal said.
“Hey,” Charlie said, walking over to them. He placed a hand on Misty’s shoulder. “Misty has a First Aid kit in the bathroom. You want me to take a look at that?”
Misty looked up at Charlie, surprised. Sitting on his ass and running his mouth was Charlie’s speed. Actually offering to chip in and help? She thought maybe a call to the Vatican was in order, for surely she’d been on hand for a bona-fide miracle. Then again, Charlie was scared, and Eric was an authority figure, an honest to God police officer charged with serving and protecting. Charlie felt safer with him around.
“No,” Tasgal said. “Not now, anyway. I have a kit, too, in the car. I pulled over and took care of it. Burns like a bastard. I don’t know why I didn’t pull him out of the car back there.”
“We can take care of that,” Misty said. “Crate will be happy to light him up.”
“No,” Tasgal said. “Just wait. Things might, you don’t know… things might be better tomorrow. His wife will want to bury him. His head is mostly gone.”
Misty felt Charlie looking at her. She kept her eyes on Tasgal. He looked up at her, and then to Charlie. “Yes,” Tasgal said. “I need to lie down.” He looked at Misty, heavy-lidded, face pale, eyes dark. “Would that be okay, Miss Misty?”
“Of course,” Misty said. She didn’t think she sounded very enthusiastic.
“Okay,” Tasgal said, standing up a little too quickly, tipping over his chair. “Sorry. I just, I’ve been awake for, shit, how long?”
“A long time,” Misty said. She picked up the joint, careful not to touch the end that had been in his mouth. She mashed it into the ashtray.
“A long time, yeah,” he said, looking down at his arm. “Let me take care of this first. Don’t wanna leak all over your sofa.”
Forgetting his gun at the table, he left, dragged himself along like a dead thing. The bell jingled. Misty walked over to the television and turned it on. Tasgal returned with his First Aid kit and disappeared into the bathroom. The news bounced from one disaster to another, and it wasn’t lon
g before Misty realized that five minutes had gone by without a single mention of the walking dead. Riots, looting, open war in the Middle East, Soviet saber-rattling, and cities going up in flames. The dead may have triggered these events, but they sure as hell weren’t doing the looting or firing the guns or threatening to fill the sky with nukes.
“Okay,” Tasgal said, holding up his arm. He’d replaced the bandages. “Good as new.”
Misty nodded toward Charlie.
“Follow him,” she said. “Get some rest, Eric. We’re good for now. We’ll wake you if we need you.”
“Thanks,” Tasgal said, and took a step toward Charlie. “Oh,” he said, and grabbed his gun from the table before disappearing into the back.
She watched the news for a few more minutes, turning the dial from channel to channel, hoping to hear more on what to do about bites. No luck. They then showed dimly lit footage of a severed human head trying to bite the hand of a man who, laughing, waved his fingers inches from its mouth. She sighed and turned the damned thing off.
“Nothing we can do for him,” Crate said. The sun had gone down, and the street lamp painted the parking lot a sickly piss yellow. Bilbo Baggins sat on his haunches, watching the road. Misty could smell the blackened heap on the gravel, but it no longer bothered her. It could be the lingering aroma of a cookout—hot dogs and ribs and half-pound burgers. The charred bodies were far enough away from her to look like dirt or compost or something in the gloom.
“No,” she said, and that wasn’t really true. Admitting to herself, much less to Crate, what she knew they should do was about as easy as admitting that the smell of the Willits going up in flames had actually made her mouth water a little. “Well, there is but it’s ugly.”
“You think I should shoot him.” Crate said, leaning forward and scratching Bilbo Baggins on the back of his head. The dog looked back at them, exhaled. It sounded a lot like a sigh.
Misty looked at Crate. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she said nothing. Crate could take that however he wanted to.
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