The Seven Habits

by William Todd Rose

“Maybe you should try a little gratitude once in a while, bitch.” Gauge spat the words from his mouth as if they were saturated in bitter venom that needed expelled.

  No one else said a word. No one moved.

  But, in the back of Ocean’s mind, a small voice whispered. It wasn’t the same voice that used to accompany her thoughts and make her doubt her sanity. No, that voice hadn’t been present since the first night underground. This, she quickly realized, was her own voice, and the message it delivered left no room for argument. Tell them about Corduroy.

  Tell them now.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘So I’m standin’ in front of the Dollar Bonanza, lookin’ at this human shaped shadow that’s creeping across the floor toward me, and feeling like I’m about to piss my pants. Every muscle in my body wants to just keep moving without even lookin’ up. Just keep on truckin’, go out the Harrison Street entrance, circle the block, and make my way back to the car.

  Because, on some level, I don’t feel like I’m ready for this, ya know? Hell, I haven’t even got the gun from Steel yet, the closest thing I’ve got to a weapon is this little pen knife I use to scrape the resin outta my bowl. How far do you think something like that is going to go into the brain? Far enough to drop an undead son of a bitch? Fuck no, man. It was like I showed up for my first day of lion training class in a suit made of gazelle meat.

  On the other hand, if my fears were warranted, if this dark shadow really did belong to one of Ocean’s rotters, then wasn’t I screwed no matter what? I mean, I’ve seen these things, man. They’re fuckin’ savage. No morals, no conscience, no regrets or squeamishness; they’re the perfect killing machines, driven by the primal desire to feed, to hunt. Killing is just this thing that they do, right? As natural to them as breathin’ is to us. So if you have any hopes of keepin’ your ass alive in an undead world, you hafta devolve to their level. No hesitation. No doubt. Just that ingrained instinct to survive.

  So I braced myself and slowly raised my eyes.

  First thing I saw was a pair of scuffed, pink sneakers, shoe laces tied so loosely that it seemed the dirt stains on ‘em might be the only thing keeping the bow together. There was a cat-shaped logo on the tongue, so faded that it looked more like the leaves at the bottom of a teacup when you’re scrying.

  Above those were the cuffs of a pair of faded jeans that lead up these skinny legs. A wide black belt cinched over a green tunic covering perky tits that looked like they were smugglin’ raisins led to a long, graceful neck.

  Before I know it, I’m lookin’ directly into her eyes—Clarice fuckin’ Hudson. For a second, I just seem to freeze. Our eyes are locked together, neither one of us moving or saying a word. I’m positive mine probably look like they’re about to pop right outta my skull, because it feels like my blood pressure decided to hold a convention somewhere back in the sockets.

  But hers… hers are dull and glassy, registering no emotion what-so-ever, and they’re so bloodshot that it looks like she’s spent the last thirty-six hours on a nonstop crying jag.

  Maybe it’s because she’s not wearing any makeup and doesn’t have her hair all done up, but she looks like a completely different woman than before. Her face is pallid and somehow longer, as if the dark bags under her eyes are so heavy that they’re causin’ the flesh to slide right off her skull. Her cheeks have this sunken look, like they’re caving in or some shit. She looks hollow and used up, nothing more than a withered husk of a woman. I mean, if she’d picked up some dude and he woke up next to her this morning, he probably thought he’d been drunk enough to give a mercy fuck to a terminal cancer patient.

  That sweat is just rolling down her face like a reverse fountain of youth. Every drop seems to leech more and more color from her complexion, and it makes her hair stringy and unkempt.

  For a fleeting second, I actually feel sorry for the bitch. Can you believe that? I mean, she never asked for this. All she wanted was to pay her bills, maybe get married someday, have a pack of little fuckin’ Hudsons running around. To enjoy life with as little stress and tears as possible. You know… the same things most of us want. But here she was, slack-jawed and as expressionless as the mannequins in the display windows of Debutante Or Bust. Nothing more than an empty shell.

  I’d be doing her a favor, right? Setting her free. Just like Ocean had done with the death ritual for her mother. I mean, I wasn’t able to keep this woman from coming back in the first place, but the least I could do was see that she was able to maintain a semblance of dignity in her death, ya know?

  All of this went through my mind in the amount of time it took to part those dry, cracked lips of hers, but as soon as I saw the slightest hint of the pearly whites hiding in that maw, it all disappeared like flash paper. Those were the teeth that would rip off chunks of flesh, man. The choppers that would gnaw their way through a throat like a rat chewing its way out of a garbage bag.

  And I was fuckin’ pissed.

  This raspy wheeze came outta her throat about the same time that I was clicking open the blade on the little knife in my pocket. I knew it wasn’t much, but if I just rammed that fucker straight into her eye and pushed with everything I had… well, maybe it would be enough. Maybe it wouldn’t. But I wasn’t gonna find out by just standing around gawking at her all damn night, now was I?

  Just as I was about to slip the knife outta my pants, I saw this single bead of sweat crest her eyebrow, right? It rolled right over that little bump and trickled down into the corner of her eyeball. She raised her hand slowly and kind of rubbed at it with her knuckles as I let that knife drop back down into my pocket.

  Why the hell did I do that? Because corpses don’t sweat, mother-fucker, she wasn’t a damn rotter. Not yet, at least. She was just so eaten up with infection that she musta been runnin’ off auxiliary power by this point. Or maybe the bitch was simply exhausted from fuckin’ like a nympho at a sex addict support group all flippin’ night. You’re the detectives… you tell me.

  Anyhow, our dashing Ms. Hudson clears her throat, but when she talks her voice still sounds as old and tired as the cosmos anyway. It’s so soft that I have to strain to hear, even in the silence of the mall.

  “Uh… we’re, um, closing. Mall opens nine lives.”

  She blinked as a confused look crossed her face, then kinda held her head in her hands like they were the only things keeping it from rollin’ right off her neck. “I mean… nine. Mall. Opens. At nine. I’m not, uh… not…”

  Tears shimmered in her eyes as her lips tried to form words that her mind refused to share. By this time I’d taken about twelve steps backward. My plan was to just ease my way outta there while she struggled to make sense of the train wreck of thoughts that musta been going on in her head.

  “I’m not cistern.” She said this last part with this little under current of pride, ya know? Like she’d dredged the darkest recesses of her brain and came up with the answer to the Daily fuckin’ Double or some shit.

  “I’m not cistern! I’m… not… cistern!” There was this weird blend of panic and relief in that hoarse voice, and her face kinda lit up.

  And just like that, I was back to feelin’ sorry for the broad again. A part of me wanted to go up and just wrap my arms around her, to hold her so tightly that even she would be able to decipher the message. You’re not alone, honey, I’m here. Hell, man… at that moment, I wanted to protect our poor Clarice just as badly as I wanted to keep Ocean safe and sound. She seemed so lost, frightened, and innocent that it was easy to forget she was actually damned.

  I actually even took a step toward her, if you can believe that. I knew the lady was infected. I knew all it would take would be a single tear in my sinus passages. A drop of sweat against my lips if I kissed her forehead like I wanted to. But, I… uh… I had to stop myself, man. I had to keep a safe distance away and try to send this healing, white light to her. Even though I knew, deep down, that my minuscule amounts of energy would never be enough. Not for her. For her it was too
late. Ya know?

  Our eyes met again, only this time, she was kinda blurry. I was tearing up like a weepy little bitch… right? I tried to say her name, but it came out as kind of a choked little sob at first. It was important for me to let her know that, even if I couldn’t save her, I could at least try to do what I had to with as much respect as possible. And I don’t know… maybe it was because I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Maybe it was because I was coming down. Or maybe it was just the moment, ya know? But I honestly got this feeling that, had we met under different circumstances, I could have really dug spending some quality time with this chick. So yeah… I wanted to say my piece while there was still a slight chance that she might be able to understand.

  “Clarice, I…”

  She arched an eyebrow and her forehead wrinkled as she cocked her head like a curious puppy. “Know?”

  That single word caused my voice to catch on the tight little knot that had formed in the back of my throat, so I tried again. “Clarice…”

  “Know?”

  Her eyes were scanning my face, right? I could almost feel them taking in every hair of my beard, my heavily lidded eyes… the little scar I got on the bridge of my nose when I was nine and crashed my bike into a tree. And then something changed, like we were standing in a field instead of the entrance to Dollar Bonanza, and a cloud just passed over the sun. Like her features darkened, if that makes any sense.

  At first I thought maybe they were starting to shut off the lights in the place, but the racks and aisles at her back were just as brightly lit as when I’d first come up, so it wasn’t some sort of environmental variable. No, this shit was emotional. Physical, too.

  It was physical, see, because every muscle in her body seemed to jerk simultaneously. Almost as if the floor had just shifted under her feet. Now she seemed tense and agitated and I thought maybe she was starting to get frustrated again, right? I mean imagine going from a rational, thinking person into someone who can’t even control their own mind. Something like that is bound to be an emotional roller coaster, ya know? So I tried again. “Clarice.”

  “Know.”

  At first, I thought it was the same question she’d been repeating, only with a sharper edge to it. But then I noticed how her fingers flexed like she was squeezing invisible stress balls, how her lips were pulled back into this snarl that looked more animal than human. Her pupils got so fuckin’ wide, man, that you could barely see the irises surrounding them.

  That’s when I knew some part of her had recognized me. A part of her that was less than thrilled with our last encounter.

  “No.”

  Then I realized that it wasn’t a plea anymore, it was a flat statement of fact.

  “No, no, no, no!”

  She was breathing so heavily that her shoulders almost seemed to bob around her eyes and her movements had become less languid. Before, she’d seemed as if the last ounce of her energy was about to leak out through one of her overactive sweat glands, but now everything was done in these quick jerks. If you ever touched an electrical wire to the muscles in a frog’s leg during biology class, then you’ve seen how abrupt the resulting movement is.

  And that also means you’ll have a pretty clear picture of how Clarice Hudson was moving.

  So I get this bad feeling way down in my soul, right? Almost like I’ve just brushed up against a creature of immeasurable evil on some alternate plane of existence. I got the fight or flight reflex kickin’ into overdrive and my hand has dropped back into my pocket without me even being aware of it.

  I was running my finger along the smooth metal, trying to get an estimate of the blade’s length by touch alone when that bitch growls at me, man. Literally fuckin’ growls at me.

  My stomach kinda sinks when I realize that my pen knife’s not gonna to cut it, dude. No way that blade is goin’ back far enough to do any major damage, especially if she’s in full on attack mode. Most I could hope for is to blind one eye before she’s scratching that infection right into my blood stream.

  So I do what any sane, rational man would. I run like my ass is on fire.

  Those giant potted plants, gum ball machines and photo booths, all the stores and merchandise—the shuttered carts that look like little gypsy caravans—all that shit is nothin’ more than a blur around me. My feet are smackin’ against that floor so quickly it almost sounds like a drum roll. Before I even get halfway to the elevator I’m already huffin’ and gaspin’ like a pervert caller. I mean, my idea of exercise in putting in ten frames of Wii Bowling. I ain’t used to this shit, man.

  At the same time, though, I know that if I even so much as slow down, I’m a dead man. I can hear that infected bitch behind me, see? I can hear her footsteps clattering through the mall and, from what I can tell, she’s not so much as even… Well, I was gonna say breakin’ a sweat. But we know that’s not true, right? Let’s just say this chick was fast, man. I mean, she’s still growling and it seems like its getting closer by the second. So that fuckin’ tortoise can suck it, man. Slow and steady wins the race, my ass… if that sack of virons wants a piece of me, then she’s gonna have to damn well work for it.

  In my mind I got this picture of her leaping from trash cans to the wire benches, scampering up the sides of walls, dropping to all fours with her arms and legs being nothing more than a blur. ‘Course I know that type of shit isn’t really goin’ down, she’s running just the same as I am. But those kind of images have an emotional impact, ya know? They cloud the mind, make ya do stupid shit… stuff like lookin’ over your shoulder when you should be watching where the fuck you’re going.

  See, when I was checking to see how close she was, I had just enough time to notice how it seemed her entire face had been devoured by a sneer. Then my shin banged against something that felt like metal teeth and my body’s tumbling forward. My chin bangs against one of the escalator steps hard enough that it cuts right through the fuckin’ skin, man. But I ain’t got time for that shit, I’m scrambling up the escalator, trying to keep moving and get back onto my feet all at the same time… the irony that I was the one on all fours wasn’t lost on me, either.

  She musta careened into one of the trash cans at the bottom or something because all of a sudden I hear this loud bang that echoes like a gunshot. I don’t take time to look, though. I’m back to my feet now, right, and I know that every second I’m still alive gets my ass one step closer to my car.

  That bitch recovered from her wipeout pretty damn quickly because I can hear her racin’ up the escalators just about the same time that I make it to the top and start hauling ass toward the book store.

  Just then this dude seems to pop up outta nowhere. One minute I’m focused on the exit and the next this big dude in a referee shirt is blockin’ the way.

  “Hey!” he hollers out to me. “Hey, you! Stop!”

  Now this guy looks like he might actually have played some football at some point in his life and I don’t wanna tangle with him. All I wanna do is get to my car, get the fuck away from the mall, and then maybe go home and have a heart attack.

  But Mister Referee isn’t budging. In fact, he’s got his knees bent, his hands up like he’s playing forward line or whatever the hell they call it, and he’s bobbing his head back and forth like he’s tryin’ to plot my trajectory.

  You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the good witch tells the rugrats they can come outta hiding and all these munchkins start poppin’ up all over the damn place? Well, that’s what that mall was like, man. All of a sudden, you’ve got people pokin’ their heads outta every store, craning their necks in an attempt to see what all the commotion is about. So besides having this crazy broad practically breathing down my neck and a shoe store referee blocking my only means of escape, I now had an audience as well.

  I knew I couldn’t turn back, ya know? The second I did that, Clarice fuckin’ Hudson would be all over my ass. And, to tell the truth, I would much rather take my chances with the ref, at least that
dude didn’t seem to be infected yet. So I did the only thing I could… I just kept right on running.

  Right as the referee was looming before my field of vision, he kinda dropped down lower, into this crouching stance. And, somehow, I knew exactly what he was planning. Maybe I picked it up from all the football my dad used to watch, or maybe it was that survival instinct I mentioned earlier. Shit, I don’t know how I knew, but I was absolutely certain that within two or three more steps, he was gonna try to clip me at the knees and take me down. And, as you can imagine, that was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.

  You know what they used to call me when I was a kid, man? Toad. Know why they called me that? Well, I was in better shape back then and even though I was always the last one picked for teams, I was also the last one standing when it came to dodge ball.

  Fuckin’ dodge ball man, what kind of sadist designed that particular piece of equipment? I mean, it’s bad enough that you’ve got these over-inflated projectiles whizzing at you. But to texture them like that? That shits stings worse than a patch of nettle, man, and I’ve always had this aversion to pain. I developed this knack, see, for just jumping right over that cruel, red ball. I’d hop into the air, spread my legs wide, and it would zip right under me. This same particular skill set also came in handy when playing Leap Frog. Which is where I actually got the nickname from.

  So, even though it had been a couple of decades since I last had to call upon this gift, that’s exactly what I did. He made a dive for my legs, just as I knew he would, and at just the right moment, I launched myself into the air, pushed off his back with the palms of my hands, and leap-frogged right over that mother-fucker.

  Now, Newton tells us that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted on by an outside force. Well, Mr. Referee was the object in motion, and Clarice fuckin’ Hudson? She was the outside force, man.

  I looked back just long enough to see the two of them crash into one another like the Keystone Cops or something. They were all tangled up on the ground, arms and legs flyin’ everywhere, and that’s when I knew I was gonna make it. By the time she detangled herself, I’d be halfway to the car. No way she could cover that much ground in such a short amount of time.