by Paula Guran
The next afternoon Doug sortied to the market to stock up on some basics and find some decent food that could be prepared in his minimal kitchen. In the market, he encountered Joe Hopkins, from the digging crew. Doug tried unsuccessfully to duck him. He wanted to do nothing to break the spell he was under.
But Joe wanted to talk, and cornered him. He was holding a fifth of bourbon like he intended to make serious use of it, in due course.
“There was apparently a lot of activity in the cemetery last night,” he said, working his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both ends were wet and frayed. “I mean, after we left. We went back this morning, things were moved around. Some graves were disrupted. Some were partially re-filled. It was a mess, like a storm had tossed everything. We had to spend two hours just to get back around to where we left off.”
“You mean, like vandalism?” said Doug.
“Not exactly.” Joe had another habit, that of continually smoothing his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger, as though to keep his moustache in line when he wasn’t looking. To Doug, it signaled nervousness, agitation, and Joe was too brawny to be agitated about much for very long. “I tried to figure it, you know—what alla sudden makes the place not creepy, but threatening in a way it wasn’t, yesterday. It’s the feeling you’d have if you put on your clothes and alla sudden thought that, hey, somebody else has been wearing my clothes, right?”
Doug thought of what Michelle had said, about the dead hearing every footfall of the living above them.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t blame you for quitting. After today, I’m thinking the same thing. Every instinct I have tells me to just jump on my bike and ride the fuck out of here as fast as I can go. And, something else? Jacky says he ran into a guy last night, a guy he went to high school with. They were on the football team together. Jacky says the guy died four years ago in a Jeep accident. But the he saw him, last night, right outside the bar after you left. Not a ghost. He wasn’t that drunk. Then, this morning, Craignotti says something equally weird: That he saw a guy at the diner, you know the Ready-Set? Guy was a dead ringer for Aldus Champion, you know the mayor who died in 2003 and got replaced by that asshole selectman, whatsisname—?”
“Brad Ballinger,” said Doug.
“Yeah. I been here long enough to remember that. But here’s the thing: Craignotti checked, and today Ballinger was nowhere to be found, and he ain’t on vacation or nothing. And Ballinger is in bed with Coggins, the undertaker, somehow. Notice how that whole Marlboro Reservoir thing went into a coma when Champion was mayor? For a minute I thought Ballinger had, you know, had him whacked or something. But now Champion’s back in town-a guy Craignotti swears isn’t a lookalike, but the guy. So now I think there was some heavy-duty money changing hands under a lot of tables, and the reservoir is a go, except nobody is supposed to talk about it, and now we’re out there, digging up the whole history of Triple Pines as a result.”
“What does this all come to?” Doug really wanted to get back to Michelle. She might evaporate or something if left alone too long.
“I don’t know, that’s the fucked up thing.” Joe tried to shove his busy hands into his vest pockets, then gave up. “I’m not smart enough to figure it out, whatever it is . . . so I give it to you, see if any lightbulbs come on. I’ll tell you one thing. This afternoon I felt scared, and I ain’t felt that way since I was paddy humping.”
“We’re both outsiders, here,” said Doug.
“Everybody on the dig posse in an outsider, man. Check that out.”
“Not Jacky.”
“Jacky don’t pose any threat because he don’t know any better. And even him, he’s having fucking hallucinations about his old school buddies. Listen: I ain’t got a phone at my place, but I got a mobile. Do me a favor—I mean, I know we don’t know each other that well—but if you figure something out, give me a holler?”
“No problem.” They traded phone numbers and Joe hurried to pay for his evening’s sedation. As he went, he said, “Watch your ass, cowboy.”
“You, too.”
Doug and Michelle cooked collaboratively. They made love. They watched a movie together both had seen separately. They made more love. They watched the evening sky for several hours until chilly rain began to sheet down from above, then they repaired inside and continued to make love. The Peyton Place antics of the rest of the Triple Pines community, light years away from their safe, centered union, could not have mattered less.
The trick, as near as Billy Morrison could wrassle it, was to find somebody and pitch them into your hole as soon as you woke up. Came back. Revived. Whatever.
So he finished fucking Vanessa Billings. “Bill-ing” her, as his cohort Vance Thompson would crack, heh. Billy had stopped “billing” high school chicks three years ago, when he died. Now he was billing a Billings, wotta riot.
Billy, Vance, and Donna Christiansen had perished inside of Billy’s Boss 302 rebuild, to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules” on CD. The car was about half gray primer and fender-fill, on its way back to glory. The CD was a compilation of metal moldies. No one ever figured out how the car had crashed, up near a trailer suburbia known as Rimrock, and no one in authority gave much of a turd, since Billy and his fellow losers hailed from “that side” of town, rubbing shoulders with an open-fire garbage dump, an auto wrecking yard, and (although Constable Dickey did not know it) a clandestine crack lab. The last sensation Billy experienced as a living human was the car sitting down hard on its left front as the wheel flew completely off. The speed was ticketable and the road, wet as usual, slick as mayonnaise. The car flipped and tumbled down an embankment. Billy dimly recalled seeing Donna snap in half and fly through the windshield before the steering column punched into his chest. The full tank ruptured and spewed a meandering piss-line of gasoline all the way down the hill. Vance’s cigarette had probably touched it off, and the whole trash-compacted mess had burned for an hour before new rain finally doused it and a lumberyard worker spotted the smoke.
Their plan for the evening had been to destroy a bottle of vodka in the woods, then Billy and Vance would do Donna from both ends. Donna dug that sort of thing when she was sufficiently wasted. When they awoke several years later in their unearthed boxes, they renewed their pleasure as soon as they could scare up some more liquor. They wandered into a roadside outlet known as the 1-Stop Brew Shoppe and Vance broke bottles over the head of the proprietor until the guy stopping breathing. Then Donna lit out for the Yard, a quadrangle of trees und picnic benches near most of the churches in town. The Yard was Triple Pines’ preferred salon for dropouts fond of cannabis, and Donna felt certain she could locate an old beau or two lingering among the waistoids there. Besides, she could bend in interesting new ways, now.
Billy had sought and duly targeted Vanessa Billings, one of those booster/cheerleader bitches who would never have anything to do with his like. She had graduated in ’02 and was still—still!—living in her parents’ house. It was a kick to see her jaw gape in astonishment at the sight of him. Omigod, you like DIED! It was even more of a kick to hold her by the throat and fuck her until she croaked, the stuck-up little cuntling. Getting Vanessa out of her parents’ house caused a bit of ruckus, so Billy killed them, too.
Ultimately, the trio racked up so many new corpses to fill their vacant graves they needed to steal a pickup truck to ferry them all back to Hollymount. Their victims would all be back soon enough, and the fun could begin again.
None of them had a precise cognition of what they needed to do. It was more along the lines of an ingrained need—like a craving-to take the heat of the living to avoid reverting to the coldness of death. That, and the idea of refreshing their grave plots with new bodies. Billy had always had more cunning than intelligence, but the imperatives were not that daunting. Stupid dogs learned tricks in less time.
Best of all, after he finished billing Billings, Billy found he still had a boner. Death was apparently better
than Viagara; he had an all-night hard-on. And since the night was still a toddler, he began to hunt for other chicks he could bill.
The sun came up. The sun went down. Billy thought of that rhyme about how the worms play pinochle on your snout. Fucking worms. How about the worms eat your asshole inside-out. For starters. Billy had been one super-sized organ smorgasbord, and had suffered every delicious bite. Now a whole fuckload of Triple Pines’ good, upstanding citizens were going to pay, pay, pay.
As day and night blended and passed, Triple Pines continued to mutate.
Over at the Ready-Set Dinette, a pink neon sign continued to blink the word EAT, just as it had before things changed in Triple Pines.
Deputy Lee Beecher (the late) and RaeAnn (also the late) came in for lunch as usual. The next day, Constable Dickey (recently deceased) and the new deputy, James Trainor (ditto), joined them.
Vanessa Billings became Billy Morrison’s main squeeze, and what with Vance and Donna’s hangers-on, they had enough to form a new kind of gang. In the next few days, they would start breaking windows and setting fires.
Over at Callahan’s, Craignotti continued to find fresh meat for the digging crew as the original members dropped out. Miguel Ayala had lasted three days before he claimed to have snagged a better job. Big Boyd Cooper stuck—he was a rationalist at heart, not predisposed to superstitious fears or anything else in the path of Getting the Job Done. Jacky Tynan had apparently taken sick.
Joe had packed his saddlebags and gunned his panhead straight out of town, without calling Doug, or anyone.
In the Gudgell household, every day, a pattern commenced. In the morning, Conroy Gudgell would horsewhip his treacherous wife’s naked ass, and in the evening, Ellen Gudgell would murder her husband, again and again, over and over. The blood drenching the inside of their house was not ectoplasm. It continued to accrete, layer upon layer, as one day passed into another.
In the middle of the night, Doug felt askew on the inside, and made the mistake of taking his own temperature with a thermometer.
Eighty-seven-point-five degrees.
“Yeah, you’ll run a little cold,” said Michelle, from behind him. “I’m sorry about that. It’s sort of a downside. Or maybe you caught something. Do you feel sick?”
“No, I—” Doug faltered. “I just feel shagged. Weak.”
“You’re not a weak man.’
“Stop it.” He turned, confrontational. He did not want to do anything to alienate her. But. “This is serious. What if I start losing core heat? Four or five degrees is all it takes, then I’m as dead as a Healthy Choice entrée. What the hell is happening, Michelle? What haven’t you told me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I’m not sure. I didn’t come back with a goddamned manual. I’m afraid that if I go ahead and do the next thing, the thing I feel I’m supposed to do . . . that I’ll lose you.”
Panic cinched his heart. “What’s the next thing?”
“I was avoiding it. I was afraid to bring it up. Maybe I was enjoying this too much, what we have right now, in this isolated bubble of time.”
He held her. She wanted to reject simple comfort, but succumbed. “Just . . . tell me. Say it, whatever it is. Then it’s out in the world and we can deal with it.”
“It’s about Rochelle.”
Doug nodded, having prepared for this one. “You miss her. I know. But we can’t do anything about it. There’d be no way to explain it.”
“I want her back.” Michelle’s head was down, the tears coursing freely now.
“I know, baby, I know . . . I miss her, too. I wanted you guys to move in with me. Both of you. From here we could move anywhere, so long as it’s out of this deathtrap of a town. Neither of us likes it here very much. I figured, in the course of time—”
She slumped on the bed, hands worrying each other atop her bare legs. “It was my dream, through all those hours, days, that things had happened differently, and we had hooked up, and we all got to escape. It would be great if you were just a means to an end; you know—just another male guy-person, to manipulate. Great if I didn’t care about you; great if I didn’t actually love you.”
“I had to explain your death to Rochelle. There’s no going back from that one. Look at it this way: she’s with your mother, and she seemed like a nice lady.”
When her gaze came up to meet his, her eyes were livid. “You don’t know anything,” she said, the words constricted and bitter. “Sweet, kindly old Grandma Farrier? She’s a fucking sadist who has probably shot pornos with Rochelle by now.”
“What?!” Doug’s jaw unhinged.
“She is one sick piece of shit, and her mission was always to get Rochelle away from me, into her clutches. I ran away from home as soon as I could. And when I had Rochelle, I swore that bitch would never get her claws on my daughter. And you just . . . handed her over.”
“Now, wait a minute, Michelle
She overrode him. “No—it’s not your fault. She always presented one face to the world. Her fake face. Her human masque. Inside the family with the doors closed, it was different. You saw the masque. You dealt with the masque. So did Rochelle. Until Grandma could actually strap the collar on, she had to play it sneaky. Her real face is from a monster who needed to be inside a grave decades ago. I should know-she broke me in with a heated glass dildo when I was nine.”
“Holy shit. Michelle, why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Which ‘before’? Before now? Or before I died? Doug, I died not knowing you were as good as you are. I thought I could never make love to anybody, ever again. I concentrated on moving from place to place to keep Rochelle off the radar.”
Doug toweled his hands, which were awash in nervous perspiration, yet irritatingly cold. Almost insensate. He needed to assuage her terror, to fix the problem, however improbable; like Boyd Cooper, to Get the Job Done. “Okay. Fine. I’ll just go get her back. We’ll figure something out.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“Better yet, how about we both go get her? Seeing you ought to make Grandma’s brain hit the floor.”
“That’s the problem, Doug. It’s been the problem all along. I can’t leave here. None of us can. If we do . . . if any of us goes outside of Triple Pines . . . ”
“You don’t mean ‘us’ as in you-and-me. You’re talking about us as in the former occupants of Hollymount Cemetery, right?”
She nodded, more tears spilling. “I need you to fuck me. And I need you to love me. And I was hoping that you could love me enough so that I didn’t have to force you to take my place in that hole in the ground, like all the rest of the goddamned losers and dim bulbs and fly-over people in Triple Pines. I want you to go to San Francisco, and get my daughter back. But if you stay here if you go away and come back here—eventually I’ll use you up anyway. I’ve been taking your heat, Doug, a degree at a time. And eventually you would die, and then resurrect, and then you would be stuck here too. An outsider, stuck here. And no matter what anyone’s good intentions are, it would also happen to Rochelle. I can’t kill my little girl. And I can’t hurt you any more. It’s killing me, but—what a joke—I can’t die.” She looked up, her face a raw, aching map of despair. “You see?”
Michelle had not, been a local, either. But she had died here, and become a permanent resident in the Triple Pines boneyard. The population of the town was slowly shifting balance. The dead of Triple Pines were pushing out the living, seeking that stasis of small town stability where once again, everyone would be the same. What happened in Triple Pines had to stay in Triple Pines, and the Marlboro Reservoir was no boon to the community. It was going to service coastal cities; Doug knew this in his gut, now. In all ways, for all concerned, Triple Pines was the perfect place for this kind of thing to transpire, because the outside world would never notice, or never care.
With one grating exception. Which suggested one frightening solution.
Time to get out. T
ime to bail, now.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “If you don’t get out now, you’ll never get out. Get out, Doug. Kiss me one last time and get out. Try to think of me fondly.”
His heart smashed to pieces and burned to ashes, he kissed her. Her tears lingered on his lips, the utterly real taste of her. Without a word further, he made sure he had his wallet, got in his car, and drove. He could be in San Francisco in six hours, flat-out.
He could retrieve Rochelle, kidnap her if that was what was required. He could bring her back here to die, and be reunited with her mother. Then he could die, too. But at least he would be with them, in the end. Or he could put it behind him, and just keep on driving.
The further he got from Triple Pines, the warmer he felt.
About the Author
David J. Schow first wrote about zombies of a sort in the short story “Bunny Didn’t Tell Us” in 1979 (not published until 1985). Then Book of the Dead shambled along and he became the only contributor with two stories in Volume One: the notorious “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” and the opening story, “Blossom,” written under the pseudonym “Chan McConnell.” Chan reappeared in Volume Two with “DON’t WALK,” making Schow the only writer with three stories in the duology. Then Chan got gruesomely killed as part of the story “Dying Words,” the whole Schow/McConnell chronology being explicated in the milestone collection Zombie Jam (2005), illustrated by zombie-meister Bernie Wrightson. With some bemusement, Schow watched as his tales of resurrected walkers—first called “geeks” in “Jerry’s Kids,” by the way—got strip-mined for assorted comic books and movie remakes. Under the present-day zombie boom, most of Schow’s tales have been scooped up for reissue in a number of phonebook-sized anthologies about the living dead. He may yet have the last word. Until then he remains active in film/TV (most recent movie: The Hills Run Red [2009]) and publishing (with Internecine, a suspense novel;Hunt Among The Killers of Men, a pulp novel; and The Art of Drew Struzan, all 2010).