by Martin Rose
I opened the folder and held up a picture of one of his mean-spirited and useless people. A smiling man at a bar with several friends. They were all holding drinks with umbrellas in them up to the camera with their faces flushed and ruddy. A New Year’s Eve party.
“Jeremy Dietrich. He was mean-spirited and useless, eh? A twenty-eight-year-old business lawyer? What did he do, exactly?”
“I didn’t like him.”
“You kill everyone you don’t like?”
“Like you never told anyone to fuck off and die when you get cut off in traffic.”
“Difference being I don’t get out of my car and kill them.”
“You didn’t know Jeremy. I met him through common circles. We’d have conventions and business meetings and he’d show up at the same set of bars and that’s how we got to know each other. We’d talk business. But he was a bore. Sexually promiscuous. Made a pass at my wife once. He knew she was married, but still, he persisted. Some people just don’t appreciate that what they have can be taken away.”
“So you took his life away?”
“But you knew the answer to that. Why are you wasting my time?”
“How’d you do it? If it wasn’t poison?”
Highsmith rubbed his hands together through the rattle of his chain and leaned forward. His eyes burned hotter at their centers as they met mine.
“I made their hearts stop.”
“Yeah, we got that. It’s how you did it that’s troubling us.”
“I already told them, but no one wanted me to talk about it. My lawyer pressed to get me examined, the usual insanity defense stuff. But I’m not insane. I know exactly what I did. Just because the fools around me don’t want to believe it doesn’t make it less true.”
“What did you tell them? You didn’t stab your victims. You didn’t shoot them. You didn’t poison them. Nobody can prove that you killed them at all. You trying to tell me you killed them with mind bullets?”
The last was meant to be a joke, but when Highsmith didn’t laugh or crack a smile, it hung in the air with gathering intensity.
I put the photo down. Faces and identities of his other victims crowded in as I absorbed this in the passing seconds. “Let me get this straight. You believe you killed these people from afar? Like some kinda weird sci-fi bullshit—”
“No bullshit,” Highsmith cut in. “I stop your heart, and they find your body miles away from me, stone dead.”
Time stopped in the interrogation room. My brain turbo-charged as I quantified this new information. Questions rammed together like rounds in a magazine.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite. If you can kill just by thinking about it, what’s stopping you now, eh, Slick?”
His face, serene, moved not an inch.
“Who said I ever stopped?”
Then, he began to laugh.
*
Elvedina and I stared out through the windshield at the parking lot.
Highsmith’s chuckling guffaw followed me like a perfume, haunted the car. The manila folder balanced in my lap beneath the steering wheel. Pages stuck out haphazardly. Five victims. My mind expanded to consider how many went unreported or undiscovered. Each victim had gone to sleep and never made it to morning. Geographically scattered, one in another state. All had the ill fortune to meet Blake Highsmith and offend him in an off-hand or trivial way. Highsmith, with his superhero cleft chin, yukking it up over their dead bodies. A charmer, a go-getter, an all around nice guy, except when he stopped hearts with mind bullets and cured zombies of their pre-deceased condition.
If he was to be believed.
“How did he do it?” I whispered.
Elvedina didn’t answer.
I popped the cigarette lighter into the slot and waited for it to warm up. Elvedina stared at the hot blacktop. I offered her a cigarette. She didn’t take it. I tucked it into her front pocket. Her gaze followed me with dispassionate aloofness while I set fire to my own, considering if it were possible that I might be driving this car and keel over dead just because Highsmith didn’t like me.
“Hocus pocus, Elvedina. That’s all it is. A mind trick.”
Highsmith could say anything he wanted from the inside of a prison cell, but it was all flotsam and jetsam, a tirade of verbal garbage with nothing to back it up. Magical thinking designed to strike fear into the hearts of others. An elaborate con.
“If he’s the real deal, then there will be others. I could just call Lafferty, right? Get his connections at the police department rolling. Get Lionel to run a database check. But, my dear Elvedina, how do you search for something when you don’t know what it is you’re searching for?”
Nothing.
“So, what would it take to get you to utter a sound, eh?”
I snapped my fingers beside her ear. Not a move or blink. Not a single reflex. I studied her, searched for signs of life. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t encountered an undercover zombie before, and I wanted to know for myself. I leaned in and sniffed her. For my efforts, I received a nose full of sweat and laundry detergent, but no telltale odor of rot or decay that would have sent my limbic mind into fight or flight.
Yet, she didn’t move or stir. She had cold and waxen skin, and she smelled like burnt rubber. On impulse, I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, pulled away and blew a puff of smoke in her face.
She plucked the cigarette out of my fingers, twisted the butt around, and mashed it into my shirt. The ember burned through the fabric and nailed a ring of fire into the unscarred flesh beneath. I howled and cursed, smacked it away until it fell like a depth charge into my crotch, requiring new, desperate maneuvers to scoop the spark out of my seat and send it sailing out the window so I could extinguish the threads of tobacco smoldering on my burning chest.
Sizzling fabric and the scent of scorched chest hair lingered in the car’s stultifying atmosphere. I turned and met Elvedina eye to eye, gunfighters in a spaghetti Western. A bead of sweat scurried out of her hair and down her temple. Jamie’s skeleton key dangled inches from the burn beneath my shirt.
The welt from the lit cigarette throbbed and pouted.
I should really stop smoking.
*
Pleasant Hills Funeral Home.
I recognized Niko’s shadow as she came around the entrance, through the funnel of back-lit florescence. I trembled inside my new skin, trembled at the sight of her, with the memory of her. Both of us in my kitchen between presses of hot flesh. Her black hair framed her square face. Formaldehyde followed her, sending aromas running away with every draft. It squeezed a sigh from me. My goddess, Niko.
She didn’t stop when she saw me, but blood rushed up into her face with an upsurge of passion. She hated me. She loved me.
Her hand flung out and raked across my cheek in a resounding slap. I turned my burning face aside to spit blood. One tooth rattled in the socket. Sensation equal parts delicious and agonizing. It hadn’t been that long ago when feelings like this were muted and dim, phoned in from another planet. Now, all of it rendered hyper-real and supercharged. Blood rushed south to places it shouldn’t. The cigarette burn above my nipple throbbed like a second heart.
“I guess ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t count for much at this stage.”
“You’re right,” she said, clipped. “It doesn’t.”
Silence robbed time from us that should have been ours. Elvedina disappeared, became a background fixture, the visible world narrowing before Niko’s arctic eyes. Mountain snow embedded in her veins. When she yelled at me again, would her breath come out in frost?
“I meant to call you,” I began.
“Why are you really here?”
“I have my reasons. But you came before them all.”
She made a derisive noise and looked away.
“I saw Jamie,” she said.
I took a cue from Elvedina and decided silence was the better part of valor.
“You’re a part of this bigger, more sinister thing. To you, it’s jus
t a job. Where I come from, community matters. When I saw Jamie laid out, that was the moment it came home for me. It was fun to pretend, to play the game with you. I always did like your type, but you know what? Girls grow up. And your type sucks.”
Being a zombie used to be a less complicated task when talking to her. No pump up in pulse rate, no racing of the blood. No difficult shove-down inside of fulminating passion. All of them, new contraindications I would have to learn to navigate.
“Business, then. I’m looking into a killer.”
“I’m looking at one now.”
There was more warmth in Elvedina’s eyes. I bowed my head and accepted my new outcast status. On the inside, I was knocking over shelves and breaking chairs. I couldn’t conceal a tremble in my hand as I spread out the manila folder on a gurney, turning over a clipping for her perusal.
“See this? This guy is a convicted murderer. We don’t know how he’s doing it. Supposedly, he stops their hearts. But no poison shows up on the tox screen. Have you seen any corpses come through here that might fit the bill?”
She flicked the clipping away and smoothed over a picture. Anna Maison. Jeremy Dietrich. Kylie Stefano. All of them, individuals frozen in time before a camera lens, and the rest of them, gone to dust.
“Heart disease is a big killer, Vitus.”
“Can you go back through the funeral director’s records and find the names?”
She blew out a breath and nodded. I gathered the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope and closed it.
“I got pulled into this government mess because of you. And up until I heard your case was a wash, I didn’t know if I’d be up on conspiracy for murder. Thanks for handcuffing me under a kitchen sink so you could kill your brother.”
“I didn’t really think it through at the time.”
“That’s kind of the problem with you, Vitus. You don’t think through much of anything. You don’t seem to think about anyone but yourself. But I guess it works both ways, because now that you’re not dead, I just don’t find you that interesting anymore.”
I’ll admit that during most of my young life, up until my shotgun wedding, I didn’t have a chance to “play the field” or sow my wild oats. I guess I’m a massive failure of masculine virility for not having at least several venereal diseases by the time I was in my twenties, but once I turned zombie, dating was relegated to graveyards and well, you grow up with impressions of what sex and love should be, and you discover everything you’re taught is bullshit.
Then you meet a nice girl. Try to treat her right. Turns out, you’re not her type because you don’t have a pulse and a heartbeat. I’d hoped for those to be at least minimum requirements. These were standards I could finally meet!
Now that I had them, it was exactly what she didn’t want.
But hadn’t I known all along what Niko wanted? She cultivated a taste for the fringe, the strange, the unusual, the morbid. Overnight, everything she found attractive about me had been stripped away. But I hadn’t heard her protesting when she let me take her on the kitchen counter before my arrest.
“You’re too pretty,” she sighed, her eyes flicking up and down my jacket. “You were something else in the days you had scars.”
The ghost of anger jittered up my spine. A cold slink of irreparable loss.
“Well, I guess we’re over then?”
“You might want to find a new funeral home to skulk around in, Vitus.”
“Last time I remember us, it was like you were fixing to move on in.”
“I’m not going to be a replacement wife. You already killed your last one.”
Oh, now that was a brand new pain, opening my vistas for what pain could be with no pleasure in it. I wanted to disappear into the background, like Elvedina, but there wasn’t a single stitch of darkness I could hide within. All I could see were white lights and white tile.
A black belt cinched her bombshell waist into a tight hourglass. She came forward with her tapping heels and grabbed hold of the jacket flap to yank me down so I had no choice but to be face to face. An experience both demeaning and arousing.
She kissed me. Dove in face first. Fast on the heels of bitter rejection, I stared resolutely forward, fixating on the carpeting, the white-washed walls, to find Elvedina at last. Elvedina’s stare, drilling through the mentholated air like galvanized nails, Niko’s break-up kiss, fathoms away from my thoughts.
“Got what you came for?” I croaked. I tasted lipstick on my tongue.
“I like to break up with people in person. You could learn something from it, Vitus. It’s called accountability.”
She turned with a flick of her wrist and dismissed me in a royal gesture. I thought of Orpheus. There is a price for looking back.
A cold wind filled her empty space, left me and Elvedina desolate, alone.
“Nothing to say about that, Elvedina?”
Elvedina continued to stare and did not look away. Her hair, the unremarkable brown of a compost heap. Eyes like concrete and just as bland gray. Prison stones.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
In the end, I hated myself more.
PART 2
SIDE EFFECTS
Elvedina rolled the Crown Vic in the direction of the house. I read through Niko’s intake files. A series of names and ages. Potential victims. Between the margins, Niko had written notes on their occupations, what they’d been wearing. No autopsies. Their heart attacks had been deemed a cut-and-dried tragedy of biology. One was in his forties, four were in their late thirties, and one was in her late twenties. Seemed young to be buying a ticket to the dirt farm on the basis of a heart attack, and Niko had written beside the youngest “in good shape, looks healthy, why didn’t they autopsy?” Indeed, why didn’t they?
I folded the papers and stuffed them into the glove box while Elvedina pulled up the drive and parked the car with the nose of the Crown Vic brushing the garage door.
The gloomy ranch seemed replete with sighs, mourning the zombie resident that used to live here. Surrounded with signs of the living—Lafferty’s unmade pull-out mattress while he worked the evidence room, the closed laptop where Lionel made his communications to Washington, Elvedina stalking through like an angry mountain cat, ranging a peculiar scent—I reminded myself that the ghosts of my past no longer mattered. The house kept a surreal silence.
Through the interior, to my room. This house had gone through as many transformations as I had: clutter and discarded clothes. A thin veil of dust coated every surface. Crumpled letters, dropped change. The pages of a newspaper I’d never thrown out. Sheets in a ball at the foot of the bed.
Beside the lamp on the end table, a square of plastic: a cell phone.
Two minutes of fiddling with the device and I decided I hated it. A marvelous invention that equated to walking with ten thousand Roman circuses packed into your hand. Lionel had taken the time to program phone numbers into it.
While I thumbed through my poverty of acquaintances, I hesitated, and then punched in the numbers to my brother’s cell phone. Ringing commenced—an ocean roar in my ear.
The line picked up.
I hit END and dropped it onto the end table where the screen winked into darkness, taking Jamie’s name with it.
This was hardly the life I hoped to come back to. I’d received a new body, been sprung from prison, and I’d had yet to have a beer or cut loose, but the truth was, that was the type of thing old me would have done. I wasn’t that guy. I’d been pummeled through the garbage disposal of life and resurrected on the other side. Trivial pursuits were gonna be a hard sell from here on out.
How had Blake Highsmith killed them? How?
The door stood open, my prison status affirmed through Elvedina’s constant vigil. Moonlight poured in and washed her in silver while I spied on her between half-lidded eyes. She did not move and I fell asleep, stuffing all the things I hated about myself inside where I couldn’t get to them, where no one could get to them.
/> I’d forgotten sleep deprivation and exhaustion, forgotten layers of unconsciousness and slumber. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d turned on the television to lose myself in a black-and-white patchwork dream.
In my hellion youth, I tasted every fever dream a troubled soul can own: long-lost fear dreams. Being late for school. Lost in a building with too many rooms. Teeth falling out. Naked before an auditorium.
This dream resembled none of them.
I dreamed of myself in my own house again. My decay lay heavy in the bottom atmosphere of the room, turning the air fetid, restored to a zombie; I moved my fingers and the flesh split, peeled back like old paint gone brittle on ancient fencing, revealing bones for fingertips. One dream reversed all my medical progress. To my horror, I was not alarmed; on the contrary, I was at home in my rot, comfortable as a dead thing with no feelings and no viable heart.
My Id sighed with pleasure: This living shit is for the birds. Come back to this. To what we once were. What a glorious monster we made!
While my dream-self rose from the bed, Elvedina’s omnipresent figure vanished from sight. The window yawned open in her place. Curtains trailed fingers over the floor. The screen was knocked out, hanging askew in the frame.
Elvedina?
Listen, a voice answered.
In the dark corner of the room, a shimmering figure resolved and stood at the edge of the moonlight. Polished shoe tips glittered in darkness. The fuzzy fade of his face hovered above the stark white of a shirt collar, the tie cutting blackness like a noose around his neck so his head floated without hinge as though disembodied. You don’t hear her footsteps anymore, do you?
Footsteps?
All was silent.
Wake up, Vitus, the man said from the deep corner. I would keep track of that one, if I were you. But it’s nice to meet you, after all this time.
Who are you?
His teeth glistened in the half light.
I’m an Inspector, and that’s all you need to know. Wake up, Vitus.
I can’t. It’s just a dream, anyway.
Some dreams are more real than others. Wake up!