by Martin Rose
The man darted forward. I crawled backward, caught in the tangled sheets, rising up like tentacles to keep me ensnared. The mattress shuddered as he landed and brought the darkness with him. His hand snaked and grew, knuckling out of his sleeve to push his pinprick finger into my chest. I cried out. He found the hot button mouth of the cigarette burn. A pair of jaundiced eyes burned yellow, his lips forming a rictus, like someone yanked a fish hook in the side of his mouth. He pushed into the burn with his needle finger until pain jittered through me like an arrow.
I shocked upright, straight out of bed—
And woke up into a midnight world. The real world. Gasping and slicked with sweat. Grabbing at my chest to throw my pursuer to the ground. I came away with my hands empty. The decay of my zombie past obliterated as I returned to my racing heart. Adrenaline became ashes in my mouth. I feared his touch would penetrate my soggy and rotten skin. But awake I was, back in Amos’s body and with all his borrowed vitality. Cells alive and my cohesion intense and frictive. Not dead. I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or disappointed.
Beside me, the ancient alarm clock beat out time. Electric blue letters: 2:42 a.m. My cigarette burn throbbed above my nipple. The window stood open as it had in my dream, the curtains blowing out, but when I blinked, I discovered it had been closed all along. I rubbed my eyes, seeing double images, like photographic exposures blurry and blown out.
Outside in the driveway, a car motor coughed into life.
*
I dropped out of bed. Pain star-bursted through my senses with brand new sensitivity. I couldn’t treat my body like butcher’s meat anymore. I rolled with gravity and snagged my boots by the door, running, running, down the hall and sliding over wood flooring to the front door. Headlights flashed through the main picture window.
Lafferty jerked upright from the pull-out couch with a garbled shout: What the hell! I didn’t answer. I gave up on the boots, dropping them at the threshold as I banged out of the front door, sailed down the steps. Sock-clad feet flapping against every painful stone in the driveway as I made out the car there, one amorphous shadow in the dark. My mind forgot which body I inhabited and I twisted my ankle with a yelp, making a clumsy turn to regain my balance, balance that belonged to someone else. Would I ever get used to it, to this body not mine? Double beams of light blinded me, illuminated the closed door of the garage before it. The car reversed, revealing the shape of the Ford Crown Victoria.
I lurched over the hood and slammed my fists on the engine for traction. Pistons rumbled up beneath my hands, radiating heat.
The driver hit the brakes.
I rolled off the engine, moving with the car’s momentum. Through the glass, an inscrutable face. Elvedina’s heartless smear of lip. Her bared and feral teeth, her black, black eyes.
She reversed the car down the incline of the drive. Lafferty yelled from inside the ranch. I lunged out of the path of the vehicle and back in the direction of the garage. I slapped my hands across the siding until I found the cold brass door knob, wrenched it and pushed inward.
In the cool dark of the concrete flooring and old paint fumes, my Ford Thunderbird rested there. I counted seconds as I slid in, her engine warming up as Elvedina made an inelegant and clumsy K-turn in the street beyond, as though cars were an old muscle she hadn’t used in an age.
Fuck it, I thought, and hit the gas.
I converted the garage into my own personal drive-thru. The door collapsed and the Thunderbird tipped up and over the wreckage, its fender crunched obligingly. Sparks scraped along the oil pan to chase the whirling headlights pacing out the street beyond. Hot and burning rubber layered the air as I jerked the wheel out onto the main road. Sweat drenched my spine. My bare foot on the gas pedal, my hand trembling on the wheel.
You’d like to think that tailing someone in a car is easy work. Film has retarded our understanding of invisibility. I hung back. When she turned a corner, I sped up to wheel into the street and prayed I’d be able to find her at the end of it.
Several intersections led us into a ritzy upscale neighborhood that began to look familiar. Newly built McMansions lined the street with landscaping sponsored by the nearest home improvement big box store. Flags hung in the darkness beside smiling and waving gnomes. Postcard perfect houses for postcard perfect lives.
She turned down into the gated community: Ruby’s Retreat.
My grip tightened on the wheel. Jamie had lived here before I killed him.
I watched her car pull through the gated entrance. After a minute of tapping my fingers on the wheel and watching her headlights make their way behind the white fenced-in gate, I edged forward, trying out lies inside my mouth.
An underpaid Rent-A-Cop in uncomfortable security gear leaned out the window to get a better look at me.
“Oh! Amos!”
I smiled and waved.
“I, uh, see you’ve been released. That’s good. You were always such a good kid, you know I didn’t believe it when they told me…”
Rent-A-Cop pushed a button and the bar rolled up. I nodded thanks with relief, pushing my bare foot against the pedal and the car into Elvedina’s back draft. By the time I turned down that familiar road, I already knew her destination:
Elvedina’s car sat in Jamie’s driveway.
I idled from the street.
Figures moved back and forth past the windows like shadow puppets. Between the gap in the curtains, Megan held out a glass to Elvedina. From here it could have been apple juice or whiskey. Elvedina took it but did not drink. And unbelievably, she was speaking. A hot sting of resentment and jealousy sank in—she spoke to her, but not to me? I rolled down the window as though I could pick up the sound through the glass over the distance. Crickets outsang her. I leaned with my hand resting on the side of the car door and my head out the window, my other hand on the wheel. A film of sweat formed beneath my fingers.
I would never characterize my brother as a loving man, though he pretended at warmth. Played off the extrovert. Went golfing with buddies, displayed a useful wit to dazzle high-society friends where needed, but it was Megan who went home with him, Megan who stayed with him, Megan who saw the deep and dark underbelly of her husband while she raised the son she loved. She loved her husband, even when he was cruel, but she adored and worshiped her son. Her dear Amos.
I wore her son’s skin, now. Owned his body. My hands tightened on the wheel even though the car was off and the engine silent. I’d known Megan since the beginning of their relationship and did my best to be kind at every reunion. Helped her out of a jam in Atlantic City once when she didn’t want Jamie to know she had a gambling problem. Now, watching her through the curtains brought to life the immensity of what Jamie had done to all of us, the consequences of Amos’s sacrifice. Had Megan known? Been complicit? Blessed her son in his journey? I couldn’t imagine it, but I didn’t know. And not knowing, I suffered in silence.
Her son was gone, her husband was gone. The totality of my final crime hit me and I retreated, leaning back into the darkness to stare at the road. I’d taken something from her I could never return. I hadn’t stopped and thought about how it would affect her, change her, and turn her world upside down—that she might never recover from this loss.
And Elvedina stood in her living room where I should have stood, begging her forgiveness.
The McMansion sported a lavish picture window in imitation of Atomic era houses. It lent the effect of a movie screen framing two pivotal characters, allowing me to view them in detail even from the distance the modest front lawn and street provided. Megan moved her hands as she spoke. Tears scaled down her cheeks and smeared her mascara. Her lower lip trembled and her curls shivered and shook with her unnameable grief. Dead-eyed Elvedina looked as sympathetic as the guy who breaks legs for the mob. She reached around her chest to a space beneath her armpit. Elvedina’s fingers sank into shadow along her ribs, the place a person might stow a firearm for safekeeping, and my legs lost feeling, paralyzed on
the floor of the car. I sat up straight, my hand on the door handle. If Elvedina had come to kill Megan, it was not within my power to outrun a bullet to save her.
Instead, Elvedina brought an envelope out of her pocket.
I breathed out a long, whistling sigh of relief and collapsed back on the seat. She set the envelope on the counter. Beside the envelope, a red folder marked a square in the polished oak of the table. Elvedina switched the envelope for the red folder, slipped it into her interior jacket, smoothing the front down over her breasts to her belly in a gesture like a mountain cat, oblivious to her own lethal intensity and made more frightening by its lack of sexuality. Elvedina snatched up her whiskey glass and downed the contents in one swallow. She didn’t even put the glass all the way down when she turned, set her palms at both sides of Megan’s face, and then kissed her on the forehead.
Megan sobbed harder.
The farewell over, Elvedina stepped away toward the door.
I needed to get a move on. Any second she’d be out the door and would find me in the street gutter, slapping mosquitoes away from my gaping mouth.
I could just drive away into the night, blazing taillights down the forlorn streets until I was a set of fuzzy glowing red eyes in the distance. But who was I fooling with the world’s shittiest attempt to shadow another person? Did I really think she hadn’t heard the car crash out onto the street, hadn’t seen me weaving after her down the roads? I could stay here and get it over with, confront her and demand to know what kind of business she had with my brother’s wife. She could investigate me all she wanted, but leave my family out of it.
I kicked open the door and slammed it shut, leaned against it to wait for her.
Elvedina stepped into the circle of a lamplight, illuminated in neon before blending into darkness. Her eyes met mine. She cocked her head, lips parted, and destroyed a patch of zinnias beneath her heel, staining the concrete with their petals until she came to a stop before me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
She opened up her jacket and pulled out the red folder, shoving it against my chest. I reached for it, our fingers brushing. Her flesh was greasy to the touch. I itched to get away from her, sliding farther down the car from her path with the red folder in hand, papers shifting as I tried to keep them in my grasp. When I looked up, her car door slammed closed, ensconced in tinted glass.
I held the folder up in the feeble light. Stamped across the front, CONFIDENTIAL, and a name typed on the tab: VALENS, LIONEL.
I hitched a breath. This was Jamie’s file. From his office. Through the curtains, Megan’s figure wafted back and forth like a haunt through a sepulcher. Finding answers was as easy as ascending the steps to her door and daring to knock.
And what would I tell her? Me, the killer of her husband. Me, the wearer of her son’s skin?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I climbed into the car and hit the gas, gliding down the street. Street lamps cut orange circles over my face as though I were floating underwater in a subterranean ocean. My breath quickening, burning. I wanted to plug my mouth with a cigarette, but left wanting, I swallowed the vast and empty night instead.
*
In the dark and amid the cricket song, I took the steps up the porch. I shoved the red envelope beneath my shirt, between the uncomfortable rub of my waistband and against my spine. My jeans didn’t fit me right with this body and I missed my unhealthy, unmuscular body. Someone attempted to reconstruct the broken garage with a creative mish-mash of plywood and duct tape. I passed the sleeping figure of the vulture who did not stir either feather or wing. The steady, faithful presence of the ugly bird comforted me as I jangled out a house key and opened the door.
Two steps into the darkness and the lamp flicked on.
Geoff Lafferty sat in his wheelchair—holes in the chest of his yellowed shirt, hand on his chair wheels, and sweat glistening on his forehead, ready to hoist himself from the chair onto the pull-out bed.
I wanted to offer help in a piss-poor gesture of rebuilding the friendship I’d destroyed. Geoff had been living with his disability a long time; he also knew the ins and outs of addiction, a pain we shared but did not speak of. His wheelchair, however, was another matter.
He put his hands on the armrests and locked his elbows, raising himself out of the seat. Straining muscles bore testament to long hours teaching himself how to do this hard work and to do it alone. While I had learned how to deal with my own wasting ailment of Virus X and my new zombie status, he had not wanted my help even then. Visits to his hospital bedside with my hat pulled low over my face had been among the first unsupervised visits that Jamie had allowed me when they finally had a fix on my dosage, on keeping the beast at bay. I had sat chewing my medication and waiting for Lafferty to wake up and discover he no longer had feeling in his legs. His wife, Selina, had her face in her hands in the hallway, saying she didn’t know how to tell him, over and over. And she didn’t have to; I did it for her. In those suspended hours of pain and interminable waiting, there’d never been time to tell him what really happened to me, and I wasn’t there for sympathy. When he woke up, we cracked jokes and kept our tragedies dialed low.
Those hospital days were far behind us.
“You gonna stare all night or sit a spell?” Lafferty asked.
He’d tumbled himself onto the pull-out and patted the mattress with mocking wink. “Come on over and braid my hair while you spill your woes. I ain’t going back to sleep anytime soon.”
I sank into the mattress. Lafferty produced a bottle of whiskey from beneath and twirled off the cap. We traded the bottle in the silence.
“You get free refills of this at the gas station?” I asked.
“Tastes like shit, right?”
“Sorry about the garage.”
“Your government spook is paying me three times what I make at the station for doing monkey work. Nothing to be sorry about. Keep destroying things. I fuckin’ love it. Place will be rubble by the time it’s all said and done.”
“Sorry about Selina.”
“Sorry never was a word Selina liked, and I guess she heard it from me too many times. Don’t go picking up my bad habits.”
“Not gonna divorce me, are you?”
“No, actually, I’m moving in. Need a roommate?”
I choked on my drink and managed to spray us both in a varnish of whiskey.
“Oh, you are gross dead or alive, for the love of Christ,” he muttered as he palmed a fine misting of liquor from his eyes. I finished a long incendiary swallow.
“Maybe I just need a good friend,” I said.
Lafferty took the bottle from me. Cold wind lanced up from the door, cracked open. The night was cool and kept me awake through my exhaustion. Every muscle ached and stretched on a rack of pain; and while it was pain, it was also pleasure. To be dead for so long, agony transforms into ecstasy. I thought about Niko. The slap, her stinging fingers on my skin. I tried to find the words to frame what I had witnessed moments before. There were none.
“You’re a bastard,” Lafferty began. “You gonna still go on being a bastard?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a zombie anymore. And it’s taking me awhile for my body to catch up with my brain.”
“Do me a favor, while you’re psychoanalyzing yourself and all that boring shit?”
“What?”
“Just, don’t get in so deep that you lose sight of what’s around you. Keep your eye on Elvedina.”
“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow. Thready moonlight painted the walls through the blinds.
“I hear the old man talking on the phone sometimes,” Lafferty said. His voice sank below the hum of the refrigerator. I leaned close to listen. “She’s not with him, if you know what I mean. Like, not part of his command. She’s a free agent.”
“What, like a soldier of fortune? And you’re worried about that?”
“You lose your logic muscle? You stop taking the zombie pills and get your re
fill of stupid? She’s a fuckin’ cleaner if ever there was one. Button man—woman, whatever. Doesn’t talk. Doesn’t want to know your name. You look me in the eye and tell me it’s not possible she’s here to kill you, or even me, just for being here. Maybe even the old man, too.”
The whiskey cap fell to the floor and rolled away from my fingers and beneath the hungry shadow of a chair. My pupils contracted in the dark. The pucker of fear moved through the center of me as my bowels coiled tight into a seething snake. Lafferty’s eyes glowed as fierce lodestones. For this man, undone by his broken spine years ago, optimism wasn’t a part of his vocabulary. He spent his life looking for the darkness in the sun’s rays, hunting out the seam of unreality behind everyone’s mask.
Me, I was buoyed by the false sense of optimism that being in a new body bought me when I should’ve been looking at the world with Lafferty’s keen eye. I thought of the red folder digging into my back.
I had thought Elvedina a babysitter, an inconvenient gargoyle to hound me and keep me in line, but her real purpose stayed secreted inside the black depths of her sunless and granite eyes, her slashed mouth, her unbearable and pitiless silence. Everything about her, a blank and mercenary tool to do someone else’s bidding.
To kill—and not ask questions.
To kill me, after I had given them all they needed to know about Jamie’s work.
I’m proud of you, son.
A fetid whisper drifted in from my unconscious Id: The old gray fox, eh?
I snatched the bottle from Lafferty. Elvedina’s headlights broke over the rise of the driveway and through the hedges so it cast scratching fingers over the wall before extinguishing.
“Don’t let on,” Lafferty whispered in my ear.
He took the bottle from my numb fingers. A car door slammed through the cricket song. Tree frogs cried, peeping wails through the pine barrens. Her footsteps pistoned, machine-like, over concrete, crushing the grass beneath her tread to appear as a shadow at the door. Monolithic. A sphinx made human. Her eyes possessed the vitality of a car’s dashboard gauge: chrome circles of black. She occupied the porch beside the bleak figure of the vulture on the rail and did not move.