by Jack Ketchum
“If Willie’d been that fast,” she whispered, “he might be alive today.”
“You bitch!” I grabbed her and started to tickle. “You just goddamn wait ’till next time!”
Then we both looked at one another and howled “WHEN!”
In September of our junior year in high school they tried to get her.
I was working the counter nights at Silverman’s Drugstore and Soda Shop and it was nearly closing time and June always came by to walk me home. Her habit was to stop in at 9:45, just enough time to have a chocolate egg cream with me before I locked up and not enough time so that it was likely she’d run into classmates.
We had friends among them but not many. Other outcasts like us. We used to call them the Halt, the Lame and the Blind. Actually they were more like the Exceptionally Gifted or Bright, the Ill-Favored and the Meek. But outcasts all the same. June and I were exceptions, being none of these exactly—I having grown up fairly good looking in a dark-eyed, hooded way and June having captured full womanly beauty at the ripe old age of seventeen. We were smart enough but not brilliant. And neither of us was meek.
On this cool September evening she was late. Only five minutes late but that was enough to make me close down early at some vague undeterminate urging and as I turned off the lights and locked the doors my pulse was racing. I could hardly breathe. Our house was just five blocks away, two down Main and three along West Cedar which was one of the perks of working at Silverman’s in the first place. You would walk there. But this night I took it at a run and I found them in a little stretch of wooded area a block short of our house. I saw them only as moving shapes in the moonlight through the scrub and birch and bramble but I saw them from the street as though I knew exactly where they’d be.
Danny Beach was one of them and the other three were seniors and we knew them well. She’d not gone easy. When I got close enough I saw that one of the seniors had a long thin bleeding gash along his cheekbone and the other was bleeding from the head from what must have been a rock and that was the one who had his pants down kneeling in front of her while Danny held her arms and the other two her legs. So it was that one I went for, the one with the head-wound, kneeling.
I don’t know where the rotten log came from but it was big enough in my hands and I took him exactly where the rock-wound glistened in the moonlight, rotten bark flying and when he went down Danny got scared and let go of her arms which was a mistake so that by the time I cracked the ribs of the biggest of them, the one whose face she’d scratched, the other was off and running and June had Danny in a headlock and was pummelling his face in fury. I let her hit him a while and then said hey, sis, don’t kill him for godsakes, though it was certainly possible I’d concussed the other guy into oblivion. He sure didn’t move.
But my voice seemed to calm her somehow. She let Danny off with a bloody nose and lip and he and the guy with the cracked ribs hobbled off through the woods yelling that that they were going to fuck us up, you hear that? you fucking perverts are gonna get yours! but by then the guy on the ground was stirring so just we picked June’s panties and purse up off the wet leaves and left him there and walked away. The panties were torn. She stuffed them in her purse.
“They hurt you?”
“Bruises. Bastards.”
“You want to tell somebody about this? The police?”
“Jesus, no. That’s all we need. I don’t think they’ll try it again, do you?”
“No. I doubt it”
“Then let’s just leave it. Want to have that egg cream now?”
“Good idea.”
The night the dead began to rise we’d been living in New York City for eighteen years. Neither of us was particularly well-equipped to deal with Manhattan at first, armed with nothing more than B.A.s in English against an already Masters-in-Finance world. I worked as a reader and then as an agent in a literary agency while June tried her hand at acting under her new name, Celia Night. Over the years she’d done a few print ads, a non-union commercial, a lot of off-off-Broadway, a few seasons of summer stock and a walk-on in One Life to Live. Like most actors in New York she got by waiting tables. She kept her eyes open though and she wasn’t stupid. When I went out on my own as an agent and started to make some good money we went in with a friend and bought a restaurant, stole an excellent texmex chef from a rival and kept the price down on the tequila. We did fine.
We were happy. We lived together as husband and wife. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Significant Others. Whatever you wanted to call it.
It was Manhattan. There was nobody to question us. Nobody to care.
The highrise on West 68th was built like a bunker against fires, all concrete walls and steel doors. So we were in no real danger at all that night. We just sat in the condo bedroom watching the news coverage on CNN, phoning friends when it was possible to get through to them and twice listening at the door to sounds of mayhem in the hall or else gazing out our sixth-floor window to the dead wandering through the eerie empty streets or being shot down by police. Tiny cracklings far below.
The homeless got the worst of it that night and over the days that followed. Dead or alive they were easy targets, half of them with senses already dulled by drugs or booze or mania and their population plummeted. But Manhattan never shut down the way more rural areas had done. Closed off to bridge-and-tunnel traffic the City’s dead proved almost manageable. For how long that would continue we didn’t know. But by the time we ran out of food a week later our walk across the street to the Food Emporium was no more eventful than usual, though the shelves looked skeletal. Deliveries were going to be a problem.
Then the city legislature reversed a decades-old policy about the right to bear arms in public and we picked out a brand-new Ladysmith for June and a used Colt Python for me. We practiced at the crowded new firing range a few blocks down on Broadway at what used to be the World Gym.
Don’t worry. You’ll get better at this, June said.
I never did.
Another week or so passed and I worked at home by computer, e-mail, fax and phone and June left the restaurant to the manager. Business was way off anyway and supplies were hard to come by.
We spent a lot of time in bed.
Then the day before yesterday our Aunt Joan called, Hanna’s sister. Our mother had died that morning and risen and died again. Both times shot by a Remington double-barrel shotgun, the first wielded by a dead-panicked thief who hadn’t the cash to pay for it but was scared to be without it and the second in the hands of old Pete Miller, who’d moved into the apartment over the store when his wife died God only knows how long ago and who’d heard the blast and perhaps remembering my father got downstairs just in time to see her struggling to rise off the floor, shooting her down his final act as hired help.
Were we coming to the funeral? my Aunt Joan wanted to know.
Neither of us liked the idea at all. Our mother had been religion-crazed for years, grown more and more fervent as she got older. She’d helped us only grudgingly through college. Mostly we’d lived on scholorships. It was possible the only reason she did as much for us as she did was to get us out of town.
We embarrassed her and she embarrassed us.
It wasn’t as though we loved her. June and I loved only each other.
“I’ll go,” I said. “Somebody ought to.”
“You don’t want to go.”
“Neither do you. I’ll go.”
“Are we going to keep the shop?”
“Hell no. She should have sold it years ago. I bet Pete’ll buy it. He hasn’t spent his first dime yet.”
So this morning I picked up a rental car at Hertz a few blocks away and headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. Traffic was light. At the entrance to the Tunnel a grim-faced balding man with a .38 police special on his hip handed me a pass which I’d have to present on the way back along with the usual toll.
Three hours later I was at the lake.
The turnout this afternoon was small. A handf
ul of fellow-traveller Baptists toting rifles and shotguns. Aunt Joan, unarmed but for the fierce set to her jaw. Me, the pastor and old Pete all wearing sidearms under our jackets. I pled June out to ill-health to those few who bothered asking. The day was mild and the cemetery was old and there was so much recently turned earth it looked like we were holding services in the midst of an ant colony. June had wired flowers and so had the church and so had my Aunt and Pete.
Pete seemed to be taking it the worst.
Hanna had been a difficult woman but probably it was difficult too for Pete to shoot her.
I didn’t get to ask him about the store.
I didn’t get through the service.
Halfway into the Lord’s Prayer I felt a buzzing in my head like a television tuned to nothing but loud static and knew that June was gone.
It was good that as family I was seated on a folding chair because in those first few moments I couldn’t have trusted my legs to do anything but buckle. I must have said something because my Aunt gave me a look and a deeper frown than usual but then I saw reflected in her eyes a grave concern and tentatively at first she touched my shoulder and then pulled me over and wrapped her arms around me while I sobbed and stopped the service howling my grief for what reason neither she nor any other could begin to understand.
I drove back knowing exactly where to find her.
Under what circumstance or where it had happened to her I would never discover but once it was over she’d gone home to our apartment, the same sort of instinct that took some of the dead to Times Square or their favorite bar or restaurant or back to their office buildings or shopping malls or homeless haunts beneath the stairs.
So that I found her where I expected her to be, at home in our bed, June naked and waiting for me, her little brother by seven minutes only, the world a hostile place once again for both of us in which there is need and very good reason to scream, the bright eyes empty and the gash in her neck ugly as badly butchered meat but waiting there in our bed for all that, waiting for the flower to rise one final time maybe or waiting for nothing at all but that other part of her which lived.
There’s another Scots belief that when one twin dies the other will not as a rule live long, but that if he does somehow survive the vitality and strength of the dead twin passes on to him, even sometimes to the point of giving him strange new healing powers like the power to cure thrush by breathing down the throat of the sufferer. I have no use for healing powers even if that were true. And I don’t particularly care to breathe down anyone’s throat but June’s.
I’ve closed our bedroom door and propped a chair against the doorknob in order to sit in the living room and write this down. I’ve half expected pounding, growling, sounds of that raging hunger they all seem to have turned toward me now but there have been no sounds, nothing at all.
She’s waiting in our bed. When I last saw her, her hand rested gently between her legs.
I’ve given a lot of thought to it and there’s only one thing I can really think to do. Lie down beside her and let her create in me a wound which is in some way twin to her own and then before I pass into wherever it is they go, turn the Colt on her and then on me. I won’t let the two of us be damned even today, when half the world is.
We were born on Mischief Night, June and I. The first windy moments of Halloween.
We’ve done nothing wrong.
Amid the Walking
Wounded
It was four in the morning, the Hour of the Wolf he later thought, the hour when statistically most people died who were going to die on any given night and he awakened in the condo guestroom thinking that something had shaken him awake, an earthquake, a tremor—though this was Sarasota not California and besides, he’d been awakened by an earthquake many years ago one night in San Diego and this was somehow not quite the same. The glow outside the bedroom window faded even as he woke so that he couldn’t be sure it was not in some way related to his sleep. He was aware of a trickling inside his nose, a thin nasal discharge, unusual because he was a smoker and used to denser emissions. He sniffed it up into his throat and thought it tasted wrong.
The guestroom had its own bathroom just around the corner so he put on his glasses and got up and turned on the light and spit the stuff into the sink and saw that it was blood and as he leaned over the sink it began leaking out his nose in a thin unsteady stream like a faucet badly in need of new washers. He pinched his nose and stood straight, tilted back his head and felt it run down the back of his throat, suddenly heavier now so that it almost choked him, the gag reponse kicking in and he thought, now what the hell is this? so he leaned forward again and took his hand away from his nose and watched it pouring out of him.
He grabbed a handtowel, pressed it under and over his nose and pinched again. One seriously major fucking bloody nose, he thought, unaware as yet that he was not alone, that others in town had awakened bleeding from the nose that night though none of them had been taking aspirin, eight pills a day for over a month’s time trying to fight off some stupid tennis elbow without resorting to a painful shot of cortisone directly into the swollen tendon—unaware too that aspirin was not just an anti-inflammatory but a blood-thinner, which was why he was not going to be doing any clotting at the moment.
The towel, pink, was turning red. The pressure wasn’t working.
If he put his head up it poured down his throat—he could taste it now, salty, rich and coppery. If he put his head down it poured out his nose. Straight-up, he was an equal-opportunity bleeder, it came out both places.
He couldn’t do this alone. He had to wake her. He crossed the hall.
“Ann? Annie?”
There was a streetlight outside her window. Her pale bare back and shoulders told him that she still slept nude.
“Annie. I’m bleeding.”
She had always departed sleep like a drunk with one last shot left inside the bottle.
“Whaaaa?”
“Bleeding. Help.” It was hard to talk with the stuff gliding down his throat and the towel pressed over his face. She rolled over squinting at him, the sheet pulled up to cover her breasts.
“What’d you do to yourself?”
“Nosebleed. Bad.” He spoke softly. He didn’t want to wake her son David in the next room. There was no point in disturbing the sleep of a fourteen-year-old.
She sat up. “Pinch it.”
“I’m pinching it. Won’t stop.”
He turned and went back to the bathroom so she could get out of bed and put on a robe. He was not allowed to see her naked anymore. He leaned over the sink and took away the towel and watched it slide out of him bright red against the porcelain and swirl down the drain.
“Ice,” she said behind him and then saw the extent of what was happening to him and said Jesus while he pinched his nose and tilted back his head and swallowed and then she said ice again. “I’ll get some.”
He tried blowing out into his closed nostrils the way you did to pop the pressure in your ears in a descending plane and all he succeeded in doing was to fog up his glasses. Huh? He took them off and looked at them. The lenses were clear. He looked in the mirror. There were beads of red at each of his tear-ducts.
He was bleeding from the eyes.
It was the eyes that were fogged, not his goddamn glasses. She came back with ice wrapped in a dishtowel.
“I’m bleeding from the eyes,” he told her. “If it’s the ebola virus, just shoot me.”
“Eyes and nose are connected.” She hadn’t grown up a nurse’s daughter for nothing. “Here.”
He took the icepack and arranged it over his nose, tucked the corners of the dishtowel beneath. Within moments the towel was red. The ice felt good but it wasn’t helping either.
“Here.”
She’d taken some tissues and wrapped them thick around a pair of Q-tips.
“Put these up inside. Then pinch again.”
He did as he was told. He liked the way she was rushing to his aid. I
t was the closest he’d felt to her for quite some time. He managed a goofy smile into her wide dark eyes and worried face. Ain’t this something? He pinched his nose till it hurt.
The makeshift packs soaked through. He was dripping all over his teeshirt. She handed him some tissues.
“Jesus, Alan. Should I call 911?”
He nodded. “You better.”
The ambulance attendants were both half his age, somewhere in their twenties and the one with the short curly hair suggested placing a penny in the center of his mouth between his teeth and upper lip and then pressing down hard on the lip, a remedy that apparently had worked for his grandmother but which did not do a thing for him and left him with the taste of filthy copper in his mouth, a darker version of the taste of blood. Annie asked if she should go with him and he said no, stay with David, get some sleep, I’ll call if I need you. She had to write down their number because at the moment he couldn’t for the life of him remember.