by Tonia Brown
Jonah nodded.
“But dead or not, he’s able to carry his own weight. Which, from the looks of your pitiful physique, is bound to be a bonus here. He’s able to walk. To talk. He should be able to hold a conversation, as long as the topic isn’t too engaging.”
Jonah smirked. “So he’s just like the real Dale then?”
“Good one, kid!” Satan chuckled. “And you’ll need that sense of humor too, because without a soul, that beast is totally unfiltered. He has access to Dale’s memories and thoughts and lusts, but he lacks that spark that helps you guys struggle with morality issues.”
“No moral filter? He’s sounding more and more like the regular Dale.”
“Think of him as Dale squared. Maybe even Dale to the fourth power. He’ll be more aggressive than necessary. He might say the wrong things at oh-so-wrong times. He’ll have trouble curbing those delicious human urges.” The Dark Lord’s dark eyebrows waggled most distastefully.
“You’re kidding.” The thought of Dale’s urges turned Jonah’s stomach.
“Okay, then let’s accentuate the positive. He should be able to drive. That will help, yes?”
“Drive?” Jonah snorted as he shot a nasty glance to the corpse, which was still mulling over a question Jonah had long since forgotten. “You think I’m going to let that drive me around? In a car? On the highway? Uh-uh. I don’t think so.”
“I’m telling ya, he’s more useful this way than full-on dead. No body to drag around. Someone to talk to—”
“What use is talking to him if he has to think every question over for a half an hour before he can answer?”
“Oh that? Just let him get warmed up a bit. He’ll be right as rain before you know it.”
“Even the real Dale wasn’t as right as rain. He wasn’t as right as anything. If that is Dale, only Dale-ier, how can it possibly be better?”
“Fine,” Satan said, crossing his arms and setting his jaw. “I thought I was being a good sport. I thought I was being helpful. But obviously you don’t want any help. I should have learned eons ago how selfish you mortals are. Give a man fire, and how does he pay you back? He burns down your fucking house. That’s what I get for trying to be the nice guy here. You know, just forget about it. The whole thing’s off. By all legality, Dale’s soul belongs to me. You can go fuck yourself for all I care.” He turned on his expensive heel and started to walk away.
“Wait!” Jonah shouted.
Satan turned in a slow circle to stare at Jonah.
In all of their lighthearted banter, Jonah had almost forgotten whom he was dealing with. Satan might have possessed all the charm of a standup comic—or even worse, an improv comedian—but the fact remained: he was still the Lord of Darkness, and he still had Dale’s soul. “I’m sorry. Please. I’m just …” Jonah let the words trail off as he searched his weary mind for excuses. “I’m nervous. Yes. And tired. But this is great. Really. This …” he paused again as he eyed the undead Dale, “… undead thing is just great. Thanks. Really. Thanks for this chance.” Those dark eyes narrowed at every word, leaving Jonah with the suspicious feeling that Satan wasn’t buying a bit of it.
But the Devil surprised Jonah by asking, “You mean it?”
For all the seriousness that went into those three words, they came off sounding a little childish. Surprisingly juvenile for a being so old. But Jonah was glad for the reprieve, no matter how immature it was. “Yes! I do. I won’t let you down. By the time I find you, I’ll be so chock-full of stories to share, you’ll have to take a whole week off just to listen.”
That million-dollar glare returned as Satan drew close and smiled wide once again. “Now that’s more like it.”
“Yes, I really appreciate what you’ve done for me.” Jonah gritted his teeth to keep from voicing his real opinion, which was far from appreciative.
Satan leaned in closer to whisper, “Pull back a little, son, you’re laying it on a bit thick.”
Without warning, undead Dale shouted, “Yes!”
Mortal and Devil shifted their attention to the undead.
“Yes, what?” Jonah asked.
“Yes, I do want you to calm down.”
Jonah groaned to the sound of Satan’s chuckle. “I can’t believe I am saying this, but the real Dale was much more clever than that thing.”
“You think that’s bad,” Satan said, “wait until he gets hungry.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say things might get messy.”
“Messy, huh? He can’t possibly be any more of a sloppy eater than the real Dale. I’ve never seen someone turn mealtimes into pure swill. That man could’ve made a pig trough out of the Last Supper.”
“Trust me, son. The Last Supper wasn’t as tidy as Leo made it out to be.” The Devil took a few steps away before he turned to face Jonah again, saying, “Well then, it’s settled. I hide Dale’s soul, and if you find it in seven days, then I will turn possession of it over to you. And if you don’t—”
“You’ll return it to Dale’s body, right?” Jonah asked, just to be safe.
“Sure, sure. Whatever floats your boat, kid. And on the other hand, if you don’t find Dale’s soul in seven days, you lose.”
“Oh yeah? What do I lose?”
“Both your souls.” The Devil said this with such a casual tone, that Jonah almost missed it.
Almost.
“What?” Jonah shouted.
Satan hissed. “Oh, sorry about that. Did I fail to mention that part, too? Boy, I am growing senile in my old age. Ain’t I?”
Panic rose in Jonah from aft to stern, racking his anxious body like a bad case of indigestion. His bowels quivered. His stomach roiled. His esophagus convulsed. Again, he should have expected nothing less than exactly what was happening. In what commodity would the Devil deal if not souls?
“You didn’t think this was a one-way bargain?” Satan asked. “I already own Dale’s soul. What kind of prize is just keeping it?”
“You said you didn’t want my soul!”
“No, I said I didn’t want to trade for it. But the chance to have them both? And do practically nothing to get them? Well, that’s just good business, son.”
Jonah, for all of his anxiety and distress, was forced to agree.
Satan rolled his watch toward him as he said, “Okay, it’s three o’clock right now.” He wrinkled his brow as he unfastened the band that held the gold Rolex in place. “That means I should see you again sometime before three oh one next Saturday. Here you go.” The Devil held out the watch.
Eyeing it with suspicion, Jonah asked, “What?”
The Devil waggled the watch. “Take it. Consider it a parting gift.”
The instant Jonah took hold of the watch, it transformed. In Satan’s hands, it had been a fine thing: a shiny, gold Rolex trimmed in diamonds, attached to a leather strap studded with rubies, and the whole affair worth far more than Jonah made in his lifetime. But in his mortal hands, it was a plastic piece of digital madness: an ugly, gray thing with glowing green numbers, that proclaimed the time to be exactly one hundred sixty-eight hours and zero minutes and zero seconds.
Jonah grunted at it. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Makes perfect sense. You have exactly one hundred and sixty-eight hours to find Dale’s soul.” No sooner had the Devil spoken the words than the watch intoned a loud beep and the time flipped to one hundred sixty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds.
Fifty-eight seconds.
Fifty-seven seconds.
“Ah. A countdown. Of course.” Jonah put the watch on his right wrist, opposite his usual watch. He knew how it made him look, but he didn’t care. Looking like a moron with two watches was the least of his worries at the moment.
“Then that’s all. Good luck!”
“Wait!” Jonah shouted as a sudden idea stole over him.
“For fuck’s sake, kid. What now?”
“I don’t even know where to start.”
The Devil snorted. “That sounds like your problem, not mine.”
“The U.S. is a big place,” Jonah whined. “You don’t expect me to just drive around to random places and ask if they have a discarded beer bottle with my friend’s soul inside. I need to at least know where to start.”
“This wasn’t meant to be a scavenger hunt, son.”
“I know, but… how about just one clue?”
Satan pursed his lips. “You’re just sucking all the life out of this for me. You know that?”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. I know.” Satan exhaled slowly as he contemplated Jonah’s request. “One clue?”
Jonah grinned as appreciatively as he could.
Satan grinned right back and said, “Ask Mr. Jenkins.” Wild laughter filled the air, mingling with the onrushing sounds of life as Satan faded into the afternoon.
Jonah’s smile dissolved quicker than the Devil. He looked over at the corpse of Dale, who had one finger shoved so far up his left nostril that one might think he was trying to scratch his undead brain. Could that rotting lump of flesh possibly know the answer? If so, how long would it take to retrieve it?
“Dale,” Jonah said in a calm, even voice.
“Huh?” the undead Dale answered.
Jonah drew close to the corpse, taking it by the shoulders and staring right into its eyes. All life had fled from those eyes, as well as all intelligence. “Take your finger out of your nose.” The undead Dale did as asked. Jonah chanced a weak hope that this might be as simple as Satan proposed. “I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to think very hard about the answer. Do you understand?”
Dale’s dead eyes wandered high and to the right as the corpse furrowed its brow.
“What are you doing?” Jonah asked.
Undead Dale said, “Thinking hard.”
“That wasn’t the question!” Jonah shouted.
“Is it hot out here? Or is it just me? ‘Cause it seems pretty hot.”
“Pay attention to me. Dale, do you know where the Devil has hidden your soul?”
“My what?”
“Your soul.”
The brow furrowed deeper as the corpse asked, “What’s a soul?”
Chapter Six
Auburn, California
163 hours : 55 minutes : 10 seconds
Five hours gone. Just like that. Poof. In the blink of an eye.
Or rather, in the thought of a zombie.
Because that’s what this lumbering undead beast was. Wasn’t it? A zombie. Pure and simple. Maybe not one of the slavering monsters of fiction, but a zombie nonetheless. Satan had left Jonah with an undead, soulless, stupid zombie. And five hours later, it was still an undead, soulless, stupid zombie.
The first hour was wasted on a pointless debate. It would seem that lacking a soul not only made you stupid, but it also left you spiritually challenged, because the undead Dale just couldn’t grasp the concept of a soul. After wasting an hour trying to explain things, Jonah convinced the creature that the nature of the soul wasn’t important, only the fact that Dale used to have one and Satan had hidden it and he needed to know if zombie Dale knew where it was. The corpse turned his rotting mind to the question, and after two hours of driving in circles while waiting for an answer, Jonah tried phrasing the question in a different way. Again the zombie tried, and again no dice. Jonah asked six different ways, but it was no good. The undead Dale didn’t seem to know, regardless of how Jonah asked. Either Satan was lying or playing a joke or both.
Probably both.
Truthfully, though, the last five hours hadn’t been entirely fruitless. No. Jonah had learned a great deal about the zombie over the course of those hours. The undead Dale acted very much like the living one: brash, rude and thoughtless. He exhibited every bad tendency the living Dale did, from saying exactly what was on his mind, right down to the demoralizing habit of referring to Jonah as gay. It was unnerving enough to have the living Dale question his sexuality, but to have a walking corpse claim to be more of a ladies’ man than he? Jonah didn’t know how long he could put up with that.
Jonah let out an exasperated breath as he brought the car to a stop beside a gas pump. Even though he had used the time to size up his new companion, the fact remained that they were still empty handed. It had been five hours of coaxing and prying and begging, and still no answer. It was also five hours of wasting fuel as he drove around aimlessly, waiting for the directions he was less and less sure would soon come. Now, five monumentally wasted hours later, there were no directions, no answer and no hope.
“How am I going to find it now?” Jonah asked. “Why would he tell me to ask Mr. Jenkins if you didn’t know? Satan is such an asshole.”
“You got that right,” Dale said. A low grumble rolled across the cab. Dale rubbed his belly, the source of the grumble. “Hey, I’m hungry. You hungry?”
Jonah nodded as he opened his door. “Yeah. Let me get some gas, and we can find a place to eat and a cheap hotel. You stay in the car.”
“No way,” Dale said, unhooking his seatbelt. “I need to stretch my legs. I’m getting really stiff. Stiff and hungry.”
“Stay here and I’ll grab us some snacks.”
“You always pick out crappy snacks. Besides, I’m not sure what I’m hungry for yet.”
“Dale, please. Just wait here. I won’t be a minute, and you’re not exactly… umm… looking your best. Know what I mean?”
Dale pulled the visor down and stuck his darkening tongue out at his pale reflection. In the last few hours, the corpse had cooled to a pallid color. “I guess you’re right.” He raised one arm and sniffed his pit before wrinkling his nose. “I could use a shower, too. Just don’t be long.”
Before getting out of the car, Jonah stopped and added, “Maybe we should just go home and start fresh in the morning. We’re only a few hours from the house.”
“You’re the one in charge.” Dale flashed a wide, dead smile.
Jonah smiled in return before he left the zombie alone and headed into the mini-mart. Humming fluorescent lights and cool air greeted him as he slipped between the sliding glass doors. He supposed he could have paid at the pump, but Jonah needed to get away from that thing in the passenger seat for a few minutes. It was bad enough knowing he had lost his best friend’s soul to the Devil, but traveling around with a talking corpse was just plain weird. Parking himself at the fountain drink station for a moment, Jonah breathed a few deep breaths, then loaded a cup with ice and soda, taking his sweet time while trying not to worry about the thing waiting for him back in the car.
“Daddy!” a little kid cried out, pulling Jonah from his thoughts. “I want that one!”
Jonah looked down to see a little butterball of a kid bouncing in place, pointing excitedly to the soda fountain. The chunky boy smiled up at Jonah, his roly-poly face wrinkling up like a snarling bulldog. Jonah chuckled as he topped off his soda and searched the unkempt counter for a suitable lid.
“Daddy!” the kid shouted again.
An older man joined them at the fountain, a weary look on his tired face. “Okay, son, which one?”
“Fizzy berry blue,” the kid demanded. “And not that small one. No! Put it back! I want the big size! Mom says I’m a growing boy!”
“Whatever,” the father said, complying with the kid’s desires for a man-sized soda.
Sniggering, Jonah left them to their father-son moment. It made a sane sort of sense that the world carried on, oblivious to the existence of supernatural oddities. Jonah certainly didn’t know his metaphysical ass from his spiritual elbow before that afternoon. He didn’t know what the next six days had in store, either, but the tingling in his stomach told him that it might be interesting to find out. That, or it was telling him he was hungry. He often found that excitement and hunger were hard to distinguish from one another.
Hunger.
The thought froze Jonah in his tracks. Did he imagine it, or did the zombie say it was hun
gry? Yes, and it said that it wasn’t sure what it was hungry for. Jonah swallowed hard as he turned and peered across the convenience store, out the grimy window, to the corpse in his car. Dead Dale was still there, thumbing through a magazine as he waited on his driver. What would the zombie Dale want to eat? Based on his limited experience with horror films, Jonah didn’t hold much hope that a quick stop at the Waffle House was going to do the trick. He grabbed up a few packs of beef jerky, praying the processed meat would sate the undead cravings.
As he stood in line behind the few other customers, Jonah pondered his curious position. All things considered, and undead appetite aside, he supposed his situation could have been much worse. Perhaps Satan had done him a favor by reviving Dale’s corpse. The Devil was right about one thing: Jonah wouldn’t have gotten very far with a dead body on his back. And zombie Dale seemed pleasant enough, with the possible exception of the worrying hunger. Maybe this wouldn’t turn out so bad. Now, if only he knew where to start looking …
“Mr. Hammond?” a woman asked.
Pulled again from his thoughts by the mundane world, Jonah glanced down the aisle to the father-son team at the soda station. A tall, blonde woman now stood with the pair.
“Betty?” the father said, as he lightly embraced the woman. “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Fine. I had to take some time out of school.” She dipped her head to the kid, who was rifling through the candy opposite the sodas, packing his arms full of sugary goodness. “Is that your son?”