21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  Lonnie did as she’d said. Lizzie listened to the semi’s air brakes scream, then took the opposite way through the alley. The formula was almost perfect. She was almost ready.

  * * *

  Dakota Bonner spent most of her time on the elementary-school playground, drinking out of paper bags and texting her friends, who came and went. Only Dakota was always there. Lizzie didn’t blame her. With a father like Dickie Bonner, a red-faced, thick-fisted drunk, she’d stay away, too.

  Dakota stared at her, face crinkled and suspicious, as she approached. A white kid with a backward hat and baggy jacket grinned at her, started to say something, but Lizzie lifted the hem of her shirt.

  “Fuck off.”

  He saw the gun and took her advice. Dakota watched him go, and turned back languidly. “What’s your problem, bitch?”

  “You’re really such a burnout you don’t recognize me?” Lizzie asked her.

  Dakota thought for what seemed to Lizzie an excessively long time. “Oh yeah. You’re that lady whose husband got killed by that tweaker.”

  “Something like that,” Lizzie agreed. “My husband worked with your father—as much as he could, with your father being a corrupt son of a bitch.”

  Dakota’s gears ground again. Lizzie could practically see the smoke. “Fuck you,” she said finally. “My dad didn’t do shit to you.”

  “That’s funny,” Lizzie said. “Is that why all those guys hang around you, Dakota? Your sense of humor?”

  She started to rise, and Lizzie jammed the needle into her neck. The pink liquid looked like some kind of sci-fi chemical, a formula to bring out Mr. Hyde, but Dakota just slumped at the picnic table.

  Lizzie lit a cigarette and waited for her to come around. She snapped back faster than Lonnie. Younger, brain less fried, Lizzie guessed.

  “Wha…” Dakota said. This time, Lizzie was ready. She knew it would work.

  “Be quiet,” she said, and Dakota’s pink-painted mouth snapped shut.

  The panic was the same—waking up and knowing your body is no longer yours, that your veins are full of fire, and the devil is turning the spit. When she’d woken up, unable to move from the drugs and the casts on her arms and legs, she’d felt the same panic. Knew it as intimately as she’d once known Stephen’s hands.

  “Funny,” Lizzie said, “how Stephen managed to fight off Lonnie and Dewey, but there’s not a shred of physical evidence. Funny how nobody saw them going off in Dewey’s truck to do the deed. Somebody in the department must have an interest in keeping Dewey Proctor in business.”

  She made Dakota stand up and told her where to go. She put the scalpel she’d lifted from the hospital in the girl’s hand.

  “Your father,” she said. “Then yourself. In the bathtub. Hurry, so your mother can come home and find you.”

  Dakota walked, pale and shuffling, in the fading daylight, and Lizzie didn’t bother to watch her go.

  * * *

  The headlines shouted at her when she walked into the Winn-Dixie: murder-suicide, molestation, child abuse, revenge. Lonnie had never even made the paper.

  Lizzie found Dewey Proctor in front of the beer cooler, sucking on his teeth while he examined a coupon for a case of Miller Lite.

  Lizzie waited until he noticed her, and he smiled when he did. “You got something to say to me, gorgeous?”

  She folded her arms. She’d worn a black shirt Stephen had always liked, with a bow in the V of her breasts. “I need money,” she said.

  Dewey snorted. “I don’t think that’s my problem.”

  “Stephen’s pension isn’t coming through for another six months,” Lizzie said. “And my mortgage is upside down. I’ve seen what the shit you cook out there on 17 does to people, and I can do better. I can deliver you pure product and all I want is ten percent. I know that’s what you gave Bonner to stay out of your hair, and considering you murdered my husband, I think it’s the least you could do.”

  Dewey recovered instantly, that mask of hillbilly good looks sliding back into place almost before the shock could show on his face.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “And you can tell your state-police buddies on the wire the same thing.”

  Lizzie pulled up her shirt. The scars branched out from her belly button. One for internal bleeding. One for the collapsed lung. “No wire, Dewey. Just business.”

  He snatched at her hand. “Pull your shirt down, for fuck’s sake. You want us both tossed in jail?”

  “I want us to do business,” Lizzie said. “This was the only spot I knew I’d get you alone.” She gestured at the shopping cart, full of shampoo and potted meat and the fixings for a roast chicken. “How is your momma, anyway?”

  “So senile she thinks the mailman is my daddy most of the time,” Dewey said. “And how the hell do I know you can deliver a product? You’re a cop’s wife. Jesus, woman.”

  “I’m a chemistry teacher,” Lizzie said. “And let’s face it, Dewey. If an inbred jizz stain like you can cook meth, then I can do it ten times better.”

  He grabbed her, slammed her against the beer case. Cold went up her back, tickled her spine. “I ain’t no retard,” he said with a snarl. “And if you wanna cook with me for real, you better watch your whore mouth.”

  “Sorry,” Lizzie said, and let herself go limp.

  “Is there a problem?” said a stockboy, staring at them like they might bite him.

  Dewey released her.

  “No problem, son,” he said. “Just working a little something out.”

  * * *

  Lizzie suited up and made Dewey wear a respirator, too. “You pass out and you’re useless to me,” she said. Dewey thumped her on the side of her skull. Her brain buzzed, making contact with the plate.

  “What’d I tell you about that mouth?” His voice came out muffled and high behind the air filters.

  Lizzie took the plants from her duffel bag. She’d kept them in the plain boxes, the crooked stamp PRODUCT OF HAITI faded and curdled from the exposure to the fumes.

  Dewey prodded the plants. “The fuck’s this shit?”

  “Additives,” said Lizzie. “It makes the smoke smoother, lets your customers smoke longer. Means they buy more product.”

  Dewey looked blank, and she sighed. “You ever smoke a clove cigarette?”

  “Ah, yeah,” he said. “Get on with it then.”

  Lizzie cooked a batch, and Dewey let one of his boys test it. The guy blissed out, then fell asleep on the sofa outside the bedroom Dewey had made into a lab.

  Before she left, Lizzie leaned over and breathed, “Wake up. Go home. Die there,” into his ear.

  Dewey didn’t say anything, but she could tell from the glint in his eye he was already seeing more piles of cash than he could spend in a lifetime, more even than Stephen had found in his trailer, when he’d broken the door down on that domestic call. Months ago now. Another lifetime.

  The batch went out, and two days later Dewey called her to the house on Route 17. Grinning from ear to ear, he handed her a stack of wrinkled, crystal-crusted hundreds. “I don’t know what you did,” he said, “but damn, bitch, you sure showed me.” He patted Lizzie on the shoulder. Fortunately, not the one Lonnie had smashed with the bat, the spot that could still make her cry out in pain. “Who knew the cop’s wife had it in her?”

  “Desperate times,” Lizzie said. She eyed his hand like a snake. She thought about what it would be like to burn it with the chemicals in the lab next door. How Dewey would carry his melted skin and scars for what remained of his shortened life, as the chemicals worked their way through his bloodstream.

  “I don’t know and don’t care to know how you cooked it,” Dewey said. “But more. More and we’ll run the Arkansas oxy boys out of here—shit, we’ll run the cartels out. Nothing can touch us. Just keep making cookies for the bake sale, momma, and life is good.”

  Lizzie covered Dewey’s hand with her own. “Sure thing, Dewey.”

  * * *


  Detective LaRochelle almost caught her the next week, pulled into the drive as she was leaving for the hunting camp. Lizzie threw Stephen’s old jacket over the vials and respirators in the backseat.

  “Your psychiatrist—or the fella supposed to be your psychiatrist, if you ever made an appointment—told me where to find you,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s against the law,” Lizzie told her.

  LaRochelle drew her eyebrows together.

  “You know, I see a lotta victims. Lot of people who get the shit end of the stick. What happened to you wasn’t right, but running off, living in this dump?”

  The trailer was rusted along the roof and sagged at one end. Water had seeped into the paneled walls, painting flowers and feathers of mildew.

  “You need to learn how to live again,” LaRochelle said. “Take it from me. Otherwise, you let Dewey Proctor win.”

  “He did win,” Lizzie told her, looking at her feet, praying LaRochelle would just turn around and leave. “I’m already dead.”

  “Will you at least talk to someone about what happened?” LaRochelle said. “I know it must have felt good that Lonnie Thibodeaux walked in front of that truck, but you need more. Take it from me.”

  “Oh, I know I do,” Lizzie said.

  LaRochelle drove away, and Lizzie went back to the camp, where she practically lived now. Dewey had gotten her a bed and a composting toilet so she could run both labs at once, batches going out all across southern Louisiana. She hauled the bed outside and lay on it, looking up at the lattice of trees. This was the last batch. The last time.

  She packaged up the pink stuff and then set the road flare next to the plastic drum. She’d be far enough away to avoid blowback by the time it melted the vessel and ignitied the chemicals inside, and then nothing but ashes would remain of the place she’d gone with Stephen so often.

  It was better that way.

  * * *

  Dewey was ecstatic. “If you were more my type, I’d marry your ass,” he proclaimed, hefting a bag of pink.

  Lizzie looked out the window. Almost sundown. Almost time.

  Dewey was making up shots. He doled them out to his buddies, but she’d never seen him partake. That was all right, though. She wanted him aware.

  The knock had come around this time, just as the horizon was gold and the sky was black. Lonnie, cap over his eyes, mumbling some bullshit about a car breaking down. The door slapping her backward, the bat landing once, twice across her back as she tried to crawl away.

  She screamed for Stephen, and then Dewey was over her, holding a pistol to her forehead. Lonnie did as Dewey said, and she heard the crack, over and over. The sound of meat tenderizing.

  Nobody steals from me. Not even some tight-assed sheriff who thinks he’s Captain America.

  “You know, it’s probably for the best,” Dewey said, sweeping the disposable syringes of pink into a paper bag. “You’re destined for better things, Elizabeth. You didn’t need that piece of dead wood weighing you down.”

  He grinned at her. Straight, perfect teeth. “You’re a wild one, sweetheart. I knew it from the moment I saw you. A fighter.”

  Lizzie pulled out the stun gun she’d bought off the Internet through the same fake account she’d used to order the plants. She took a few seconds to aim—aim right the first time, Stephen had said, and the rest is easy.

  Dewey gave half a yell, then he went down. Lizzie left him on the floor, his pants piss stained, and peered through the curtains. In the woods, things moved. It was full dark. It was time.

  She unlocked the three dead bolts and threw the steel door wide open. Stupid, anyway—if the DEA wanted to break in, they’d just go through the flimsy, half-rotted wall around it.

  Dewey moaned, then sat up. “Fuck! What the fuck?” he shouted.

  Lizzie tossed the stun gun aside and stepped on Dewey’s chest, holding him down. “Feel that?” she said. “It doesn’t take much to crush a lung. Far fewer pounds per square inch than you’d think. My doctor told me that.”

  “You fucking bitch whore!” he screamed. “The hell you think you’re doing? You going to steal from me?”

  “No, Dewey,” Lizzie said. “I know what happens to people who take what’s yours.” She watched the first white shape lurch up the weed-studded walkway and through the door. One of Dewey’s pals, the one she’d told to go home and die. His arm hung flimsy and mangled, like he’d been sideswiped by a car, and he limped. His eyes were white with cataracts.

  Dewey started up again, and Lizzie kicked him down. “I don’t want your meth, Dewey. I don’t want your money. I didn’t want Lonnie’s apology and I didn’t want to pretend that I don’t know you and Dickie Bonner were thick as thieves.”

  She grabbed a bag of the pink stuff, ripped it open, and threw it over Dewey. He thrashed, noticing the lurching figure for the first time.

  “What is going on?” he screamed.

  “Best question you’ve ever asked,” Lizzie said. “See, you didn’t know me, Dewey. You don’t know me. Stephen was just doing his job when he seized that cash. I figure it was probably to pay off the cartel or somebody else, and you were in deep shit. You got one of your pet tweakers to beat him to death as payback, and I was collateral damage. That about right?”

  The figure clawed at Dewey’s pant leg, and he kicked and screamed.

  “I had a lot of time after I woke up,” Lizzie said. “A lot of time to research. Any moron can learn how to make meth, but it takes a little more doing to come up with a way to cook in Datura stramonium.” She took another step toward the door. More figures were crossing the highway now, coming from the woods. “That’s jimson weed to you, Dewey. The devil’s trumpet. A few other toxins, a few additives, and you know what you’ve got?”

  Dewey was screaming, and two of the things held him down, clawing deep furrows into his flesh as they tried to scoop up the crystals.

  “A dead man,” Lizzie said. “A dead man who can’t be bargained with, can’t be intimidated. A dead man who will listen to whoever puts an order in his ear. A dead man who, once he dies and wakes up again, has a jones like the devil sunk his teeth into your soul. A junkie who’ll do anything to chase that high.”

  She glanced out. She needed to go if she was going to avoid the majority of the crowd converging on Dewey’s momma’s place, hunting their next fix of the pink stuff.

  “Half the tweakers in this parish are in NA, which meets in the hospital, which is where I go twice a week for physical therapy,” she said. “Pretty easy to plant a suggestion. To tell everyone that their favorite pusher is holding out on them.”

  She ripped two more bags for good measure, as Dewey screamed. The figures had given up on the crystals now and were licking and biting at his clothes, his skin and hair.

  Lizzie raised her voice to be heard. “I could have lost Stephen,” she said. “I could have lived with pain every moment for the rest of my life and a brain so scrambled I can’t think half the time.”

  She lifted her shirt, exposing the scars. “But you took this from me, too, Dewey. Stephen was so excited to be a father. You stole that.”

  He met her eyes, blood running down from his scalp, mouth open so far that she couldn’t believe he hadn’t unhinged his jaw.

  “Nobody steals from me, Dewey,” she said, and slipped out.

  She could still hear his screams from the highway.

  * * *

  Stephen’s grave was covered with rotting flowers and tilted wreaths, personal messages from deputies and people he’d helped during his time with the department.

  Lizzie moved them aside, the sweet scent of death rising, and sat cross-legged, leaning against the stone. The night was close and heavy, but the stone was cool.

  She took out the disposable syringe, the shot she’d kept hidden in the back of the trailer’s refrigerator until tonight.

  Lizzie slipped off her belt and tied off her arm. She’d watched the nurses do it so much that she found a vein
the very first time.

  She watched a little blood swirl as she drew on the syringe. Nobody would question it. She was grief-stricken, she wasn’t thinking clearly. She’d never visited her psychiatrist. Nobody knew about Dewey. Who’d believe it if they did?

  Lizzie paused to see if she was afraid, if she had the flutter in her stomach she used to get as Stephen would leave for his shift, the flutter that wouldn’t entirely subside until she saw him again.

  Nothing. That wasn’t too surprising, Lizzie thought as she depressed the plunger.

  She was already dead, after all.

  THE DEAD OF DROMORE

  Ken Bruen

  THE DEAD ARE DIFFERENT from you and me.

  Well, duh!

  Hello, like we didn’t know.

  Major Sean Fitzroy, in charge of Special Operations, told me this. He was in the process of warning me that no protection could be guaranteed if I persisted in entering Dromore.

  We were standing in his distinctive black tent, Command Center.

  Fitzroy was one of those Irish who believed utterly in the magic of his own words. If he said it, then you better heed it. He had a point. The village had been sealed off since the outbreak, nothing in or out. But a distress signal had been issuing on the hour from the tiny church in the center of Dromore. In Morse, it spelled simply

  “Help.”

  I said

  “Someone is holding out there.”

  He shook his military head.

  “They’re all dead.”

  Paused

  Added

  “… Ish.”

  I said

  “Someone is sending the signal. I don’t think it’s one of the infects, unless they’re a whole lot smarter than you think.”

  Infects. The term for the victims of the infection. If infection it was. The military felt better about destroying something they had labeled. Made it, to use another of their buzz terms, an operation.

  “Operation decimation.”

  Due in twenty-four hours.

  I said

  “I’m not Jack Bauer. You need to give us more time.”

  Us being my team.

  He stared at me.

  “Jack who?”

  Not a TV aficionado, then.