The Z Club

by Bouchard, J. W.

  “Looks like a bunch of chicken scratch to me,” Finnigan said.

  “Chink writing,” Branagan said. He spoke with a watered-down New England accent. He’d moved to Trudy thirty years ago, but a little of the hometown Jersey boy remained.

  Ryan winced. Branagan was a racist. Not the hardcore, let’s-go-lynch-somebody variety, but comfortable enough that he didn’t feel the need to hide it. The sad fact was, in a town like Trudy, that kind of thinking was still tolerated; for some, the old ways were alive and kicking.

  “You know Chinese now?”

  “Don’t any of you watch the news? The Chinamen lost themselves a space ship. Last I heard, that’s not a common occurrence, so I reckon this is the one they was talkin’ about.”

  They stood watching for twenty minutes while the snow fell softly and the firefighters put out the remaining flames. After the smoke had cleared, Ryan followed Branagan, Finnigan, and Aldo over to the shuttle’s forward fuselage where it had snapped from the ship’s central body. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, and paramedics were loading what was left of the ship’s crew into body bags.

  “I don’t get it,” Ryan said. “How does a Chinese space shuttle crash land in Iowa?”

  “Bad fuckin’ luck,” Branagan said. “That’s how.”

  “Worst kind,” Finnigan agreed.

  “Um huh,” Aldo grunted.

  A medic was dragging one of the ship’s cushioned seats. An astronaut was still strapped in it. As the medic passed, Branagan said, “Hold up a sec.” Branagan approached the body and studied it for a minute. “What happened to him?”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” the medic said. “Are you talking about the fact that he looks like a TV dinner that cooked in the microwave too long, or that the top of his head is missing.”

  Judging by Branagan’s expression, it was the latter that had caught his attention. Stepping closer, Ryan noticed it too. How the hell does that happen to a guy, he thought.

  The top of the astronaut’s head was missing; scalp, skull, and all. There were deep grooves in the bone of the skull where the man’s forehead would have been, and Ryan noticed something else: peering down into the man’s head, all he saw was an empty black hole. The man’s brain was missing.

  Ryan glanced at the medic. “Hey, your guess is as good as mine,” the medic said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe it’s like those pop-up timers people use during Thanksgiving. That little red thing pops up when the turkey’s done. Could be his head did the same thing. Guy cooked too long and his brain exploded right out the top of his skull.”

  “You’ve seen stuff like that before?”

  “Hell no. I’m just saying…stranger things have happened.”

  The medic resumed dragging the body, chair and all, toward the ambulance.

  “That seem right to you?” Branagan asked, looking at Ryan.

  “Nope.”

  “What are we gonna do with this fiasco?” Finnigan said.

  “Pawn it off. Call in the State Police, Aldo. Have them send a guy out here. Or better yet, two or three guys. Let them deal with it. They can take it up the chain from there.”

  Aldo said, “It happened in the county.”

  “I don’t care if it happened in Lizzie Baker’s back yard. We’re gonna wash our hands of this whole damn mess before we even get ‘em dirty. And make it quick. I want the so-called experts here before any reporters show up. That cunt from channel 6 would just love to catch me with my thumb up my ass.”

  Aldo headed off for his patrol car, Finnigan kept pace beside him. They were too far away to hear it when a man screamed. Ryan saw one of the firefighters writhing on the ground twenty feet away. He rushed past Branagan, whose reaction time had slowed significantly over the years.

  Ryan reached the downed firefighter, looking up at the other men that had rushed over. “What happened?”

  “Beats me,” one of the other firefighters said. “He was fine a second ago.”

  Ryan kneeled down beside the firefighter. The man had yanked off his helmet and was clutching his head between his hands, squeezing it as though he were trying to keep a bomb from exploding. His face had gone a deep purple color and the vein in his forehead pulsed and throbbed. Ryan noticed a faded tattoo on the firefighter’s neck depicting a grinning skull wearing a fire helmet.

  Several of the medics arrived, saw the color of the firefighters face. “He’s asphyxiating. Get him in the ambulance.”

  One of the medics grabbed the man beneath the shoulders, another by the legs, and they lifted him off the ground and began carrying him away. By the time Branagan reached the scene, the medics had already loaded the screaming firefighter into the back of the ambulance.

  “What was that about?” Branagan asked, wheezing after the short jog.

  “Beats me.”

  Ryan spotted a heavy-duty plastic container several feet away. The lid was one of those springy kind that have a metal latch to hold it in place. The container was on its side, a haphazard crack running down the center of the plastic, so that Ryan was looking at two halves of the red biohazard symbol printed on the container’s side.

  Branagan took a step forward, starting to bend down to take a closer look at the container. Ryan grabbed Branagan’s shoulder and pulled him back, shaking his head. Ryan said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sheriff. Unless you want to end up like the other guy.”

  Branagan righted himself, nodding. “I don’t want anyone else getting in till the Staties get here. That clear?”

  “Roger that.”

  Running a beefy hand along his cheek of scratchy gray stubble, Branagan said, “This is bad shit.”

  Ryan agreed.

  Chapter 5

  The shop’s clock stood at quarter to nine. Despite the cold weather, the front door was propped open to help dampen the strong smell of bleach left in the air after Derek had used too much of it to mop the tiled floor in the back room.

  They’d had their usual Friday night rush around 5pm, and the store had been dead since then. Rhonda and Derek sat at one of the long folding tables playing Magic: The Gathering. Kevin sat behind the display counter, pretending to browse the Internet while he stole quick glances at Rhonda.

  Rhonda, who had stopped home to change after her shifted ended at Jackie’s, was now dressed in full goth girl (or was it emo – Kevin could never remember which was which) attire, consisting of a tight black top, matching black skirt, and purple-and-black striped socks (Kevin wasn’t sure if they called them socks or if there was another word for them) that went all the way up to her lower thighs. She was wearing black lipstick and heavy black eyeliner.

  Kevin didn’t care if she considered herself goth or emo or some other fucking thing. In fact, a part of him wished she was wearing that white make-up (which always reminded him of Brandon Lee in The Crow) she wore sometimes when she went all out. Somehow, it made her look even sexier, and with her ultra-white skin he always imagined sleeping with her would be like sleeping with a super hot alien.

  Watching them sit there and play magic, Kevin was reminded of another of life’s certainties he had learned while running a shop which mainly catered to nerds: gamers were a different breed. They deserved a customer category all to themselves; and, Kevin thought, they annoyed him more than any of the other categories. He had never been able to put his finger on the reason, having never been much of a gamer himself, and he was more than happy to steer them in Rhonda’s or Derek’s direction whenever one of them walked in off the street.

  Derek slapped his hand against the table. “You beat me again.”

  “Beginner’s luck?” Rhonda said.

  “Wanna play again?”

  “Go ahead and wrap it up,” Kevin said. “Might as well close up a little early.”

  Derek glanced at the clock. “Yeah, a whole ten minutes.”

  “We’ve got places to be.”

  “Can I go?”

  “Maybe once you get a real
haircut, I’ll consider it. Until then…”

  “Oh, c’mon, Kev,” Rhonda said. “Let him tag along. What would it hurt?”

  “Huh uh. No way. Besides, who’d take him home?”

  Derek seemed to ponder this, rubbing at a zit on the side of his nose.

  “I’ll drive him,” Rhonda said.

  Derek raised his eyebrows. “Uh…she’ll drive me,” he said without believing it.

  Rhonda said, “He’s on my way home. He’ll be on his best behavior. Isn’t that right, Derek?”

  “Yup.”

  Kevin rolled his eyes. “Why do you have to be such a damn do-gooder?”

  “Um, duh, I work in a comic book store? How do you expect a girl to be when she’s surrounded by superheroes all day? I’ll even sugar coat it,” Rhonda said. “How about if you let our green-haired Apache attend the meeting tonight, and I’ll let you take me out sometime?”

  For once in his life, Kevin was at a loss for words. His face flushed red, grasping for the right words, and when they eventually came, they hitched and sputtered out of his mouth like a lawnmower running out of gas. “Well, uh, I don’t…why would I…” and he kept going like that, creating a string of confusing thoughts.

  Be cool. It was the only advice his brain was willing to offer up, and he kept having to remind himself that he’d been with girls before, this wasn’t the first one, and he should stop acting like a 30-year-old virgin with a pronounced speech impediment.

  But hasn’t it been a while? Nine months? A year? Longer? It wasn’t exactly as easy as riding a bike.

  It wasn’t the sex part that he was hung up on; it was the part about trusting someone. Angela was responsible for that particular phobia.

  Finally, he said, “Why do you care so much whether he goes along or not?”

  Rhonda shrugged, smiling, head tilted, staring up at him with those big green puppy dog eyes surrounded by too much eyeliner. Kevin kind of liked it; he’d always thought girls with their mascara running looked hot. “Charity?”

  Kevin didn’t care why she was doing it, he just didn’t want to sound too eager. He nodded slowly, doing his best to look like the hard ass with a heart.

  “Okay, fine, he can come. But you’re his babysitter. If he fucks up, it’s on you.”

  “Got it.” She shot a glance at Derek. “He won’t.”

  “Let’s shut it down then,” Kevin said. “We’ve got a date with the dead.”

  Becky Russell lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the upper level of a 4-plex located in one of the better neighborhoods in town. To be fair, there wasn’t any such thing as a bad neighborhood in Trudy, but there was no arguing against the fact that the north side was dominated by a wealthier class of people. Becky’s father had been a successful financial advisor at Edward Jones in Des Moines before he opened a local office in Trudy and subsequently ran it into the ground (it had long been a matter of speculation which Frank Russell would run into the ground first: his business or his liver), which somehow qualified him to step into the position of Vice President of Trudy City Bank.

  He also happened to own the 4-plex that Becky lived in.

  When Ryan pulled up to the curb in front of the 4-plex in his patrol car, Becky was already sitting at the bottom of the steps leading to the upper level. Her strawberry blonde hair was tucked up under a white stocking hat, and she wore tight blue jeans, the legs of which were tucked into snow boots with imitation fur lining the tops.

  Ryan exited his black-and-white, walked around to the other side, and opened the passenger door as Becky came down the sidewalk.

  “Wow, I see you pulled out all the stops,” Becky said, nodding at the patrol car before she slid into the passenger seat.

  “I thought you should ride in style,” Ryan said.

  “I’m honored. And you came in uniform too.”

  “Careful, or I’ll make you ride in the back.”

  After Ryan had gotten back into the driver’s seat and shifted the car into drive, Becky said, “You haven’t told me where we’re going yet?”

  “Yeah, about that,” Ryan said, trying to mask his nervousness. He’d been a bundle of nerves all day; apprehensive about the prospect of Becky meeting his friends. She had asked him about it several times now, and he had finally decided that he might as well get it over with, hoping like hell it wasn’t a deal-breaker. Becky didn’t display any of the characteristics that he normally associated with the upper class, but his friends weren’t exactly the cream of the crop when weighed on the scale of normalcy. It was a fact that hadn’t occurred to him until he had started dating Becky. They had been seeing each other for a month and it was going well, but there was always that nagging insecurity in the back of Ryan’s mind that sooner or later she would see through him, past the badge, the uniform, and figure out that he was only a nerdy kid pretending to be a grown up.

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  “This is what? Our fifth date?”

  “Sixth.”

  “And you keep talking about how you want to meet my friends.”

  Becky said, “And you keep putting it off because you’re ashamed of me.”

  “Well, start getting excited. Your wish is about to come true.”

  “Really? I’m excited.”

  “One favor though,” Ryan said. “About my friends. Just…lower your expectations.”

  Chapter 6

  Becky started to glance at him nervously when he turned the car onto the curving gravel road and passed through the open wrought-iron gates at the entrance to Trudy Cemetery.

  It had stopped snowing. The thin layer of snow on the streets was turning to slush, which in the next several hours would freeze and turn to ice, causing the type of hazardous road conditions that usually doubled the emergency call volume down at dispatch. Weather like this attracted stupid people like moths to a flame.

  The sky was clear and millions of stars gazed down at them as Ryan took the winding path at a crawl. In the distance, they could see the lights of the oil refinery, thick clouds of smoke billowing up from its numerous stacks.

  “Should I even ask?” Becky said.

  “This is kind of our old stomping ground,” Ryan said, switching on the spotlight that was mounted near the driver’s side-view mirror.

  “A cemetery?”

  Ryan smiled because he wasn’t about to try explaining it. Earlier that day when he had decided that he was going to go through with this, he had thought the best way to go about it would be the same way his father had taught him to swim: just push her in and yell, “Swim!”

  Now he wasn’t so sure that had been the wisest decision. Maybe should have started slow, he thought. Met up for pizza or something. Too late now.

  Becky watched out the passenger-side window as they passed dozens of snow-topped gravestones, and as desperately as Ryan wanted to say something humorous to lighten the mood, he couldn’t find words to fill the awkward silence.

  “You’re not secretly a serial killer masquerading as a police officer are you?” Becky asked. “Pulling a Dexter or something.” She laughed in a way that made Ryan wonder if her question wasn’t at least half-serious.

  “What gave it away?”

  “Hmm…let me see…”

  That worked a little and Ryan thought: You should be the one thinking of funny shit to say.

  Ryan saw the back of Fred’s truck up ahead and pulled in behind it, parking on the grass shoulder. Kevin’s Neon and Rhonda’s Prius were both parked on the other side of the path.

  “Looks like the gang’s all here,” Ryan said, killing the engine.

  “You don’t think this is a little spooky?” Becky asked. “Hanging out in a cemetery in the middle of the night?”

  Ryan said, “Don’t worry, I have a gun.”

  Ryan went around the car, opened the passenger door, and waited for Becky to get out. She shivered. Her fleece jacket was too thin, meant for early autumn, and winter had already taken a grip on the town. Ryan popped the tru
nk, digging around until he found a heavy brown coat with the Coldwater County Sheriff’s Department’s badge embroidered into the fabric. He held it open and let Becky slide into it.

  “Better?”

  Becky nodded, following Ryan as he cut across the cemetery. Becky did her best to keep from looking at the headstones as they passed. She had always found cemeteries sad and depressing places during the day, but at night they became something else. Intimidating, she thought, but scary was the true word for it. Her own great grandfather was buried somewhere in Trudy Cemetery, but she couldn’t remember where. She may have visited his grave once years ago, but she didn’t know anything about the man. He had died when she was only a baby.

  “Why here?” she asked as a way to keep the silence at bay.

  Ryan saw her stumble, grabbed her arm, and then took out his flashlight. He shined the beam several feet in front of them so it was easier to see where they were going. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Fred, Kevin, and I started sneaking out here when we were just kids. Kev moved to Boulder to go to college, and we stopped after that. He moved back about seven years ago, and we started up again like we’d never quit in the first place. Maybe when we were young we had a reason, but if we did, I don’t remember what it was.”

  “I guess it isn’t that weird,” Becky said. “Kids do stuff like that.”

  She didn’t come right out and say it, but Ryan knew what she was thinking without even having to look at her face: but you’re adults now, so why are you still doing stuff like this?

  “I’ve got a bit of a confession to make. My friends and I, we weren’t exactly the cool kids when we went to school. Fred and Kev were downright dorks. I didn’t have it quite as bad. I was a big-time nerd, but I didn’t get picked on. At least not that much. None of the older kids made me do naked push-ups in the boy’s locker room anyway. Fred and Kev weren’t so lucky.”

  Becky giggled, hugging herself as they walked. She felt better now that she was warm and cozy wrapped in Ryan’s coat. “Why are you telling me this?”