DEAD (Book 12): End

by TW Brown

  Lisa Jenkins was a teenage runaway. However, I doubted that her parents would come looking for her any time soon. In the six months that she had lived with me, I learned enough to know that it was unlikely that they were even aware that she had left home. Her father was long gone, and her single mother was busy sleeping with every bus boy, waiter, and bartender at this dirty little all-night place in Southeast Portland.

  I’d popped in once and the woman was letting some slob put his hands up her skirt every time she came to the table. When she brought the actual meal to the table and cleared away the five empty beer bottles to make room, I almost lost my proverbial lunch. It was fried chicken, and I know for a fact that he didn’t wash his hands before picking up that drumstick. And considering where that hand had just been…

  But back to my dear friend and boon companion. (I don’t actually know what a ‘boon companion’ is, but I heard that term used on some show on the local Public Broadcasting channel where everybody spoke with English accents. It sounded smart, so I claimed it.) I met Lisa one night shortly after my transformation. She had been in a seedy hotel after just giving birth. Her “boyfriend”—a pervy forty-something that actually convinced her to dump the child in the garbage right after giving birth—made the mistake of answering the door when I knocked. Long story short, baby was rescued and eventually given a home, perv was killed and then eaten, and Lisa became my roommate.

  It was around the time that I met Lisa when I was introduced to a whole part of society that most folks don’t realize exists under their noses. Call it supernatural or whatever you like, but things like ghouls, and ghosts, and vampires—like that snarky little bitch Belinda Yates—exist.

  Some have gone on to sustain themselves through books like the one you are reading right now. You see, the best way to hide is in plain sight. You’d be surprised if I told you which of the other books in your collection are real; or at least based on real events in the lives of some of my fellow monsters. Yeah, most of them don’t like the “M” word, but I like to consider myself a bit more progressive.

  I actually decided to join the ranks of the writer-types after my first little “adventure” where I was hired to deal with a rogue vampire that had designs on the aforementioned Belinda. Well…not really Belinda, more specifically, her Kiss. (A “Kiss” for the uninitiated is what vampires call their little groups or clubs…whatever.) I didn’t actually have to write, but Lisa thought it would be fun. She worries about the finances like nobody I have ever met and keeps telling me that the payday I got for taking care of Belinda’s “little problem” won’t last forever.

  After I saw this car, I finally agreed that we needed an additional source of income. The only problem now was waiting for the next “job” from Morgan. For those of you who didn’t catch my first little attempt at telling a story, Morgan is the psychic for my region. Unlike the ones on television that lie about being able to tell your future, Morgan is for real. Apparently true psychics are able to detect any supernaturals in their district. I don’t know all of the details—mostly because she tells me very little—but I guess they act as some sort of mediator and boss for their given district.

  The day I became a ghoul, I received a visit from Morgan. She kind of told me the rules. Mostly she went on about all the stuff I couldn’t do. Of course, it was good old Ava’s door that they knocked on when that vampire came in and started mucking things up.

  By the time Billy Idol had told me all about what a great day it would be for a White Wedding, and the Go-Gos encouraged me to take a Vacation, we were home. And here was the reason we needed Morgan to show up with another job…or people needed to start buying these books. Home was no longer the dirty little apartment that I’d rented while I was a busty waitress with raven-black hair. Now we lived in a sweet little two-story looking down on Lake Oswego. (I never knew there was actually a lake here! Just thought it was a cute name for a town.)

  It has four bedrooms! Now I wasn’t ever going to hear the pitter-patter of ghoulish feet, but maybe Lisa might give it a go when she is actually old enough and meets a nice guy. I have a feeling that I will be living vicariously through her.

  And there you have it—my word for the day: vicariously. Take that Morgan. She always talks to me like I am the idiot child. Well now that I have hired a ghost writer—literally, I seriously have this ghost that comes in and helps, she possesses Lisa when it is time to sit down and put the story together—I get to hear all sorts of big words.

  Chantal, my ghostly pal, likes to chat sometimes during the day. She sometimes slips in to Lisa while she is dozing and will chat with me about stuff. At first it was weird having these conversations that Lisa has no memory of, and I have to get it straight who I am talking to or what I have said to Chantal-Lisa and what I have said to Lisa-Lisa.

  Hmm, that reminds me. I fiddle with my iPod docking station and thumb to a song. One of my favorite features of this home was the sound system. You can have music—or whatever you are watching on television—piped throughout the whole place. Head-to-Toe by Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam starts, and I head for the basement door.

  “Back in a few minutes,” I call over my shoulder. I catch Lisa’s face in the reflection of the kitchen window. Her nose wrinkles. If I wasn’t so secure in our friendship, my feelings might be hurt. Hey…a girl’s gotta eat.

  My basement is the other feature that really sold this house to me. A serial killer would blow his…well, whatever it is that they blow. You can bet my basement would be the thing that would send said serial killer over the edge.

  It is absolutely sound proof. I tested it out early when I brought my ex-husband’s guitar amplifier down here. My actual goal was to check out the real estate agent’s claim that this basement was, in fact, sound proof. If I just happened to blow up his amplifier in the process, that would be icing on the cake.

  I plugged in the pretty green guitar that was still in my closet despite the fact that we had been divorced long enough for that cheating bastard to remarry and have a pair of twin snot factories…err…I mean a lovely set of boy and girl twins. (I can never remember which is fraternal and which is maternal…not like I actually care.) Anyways, I plugged that guitar in, turned every single knob on the amplifier to “10” and strummed. I forgot all about my super-sensitive ghoul hearing.

  For almost a week I was absolutely deaf. Thankfully I have the ability to heal. Supposedly, I can take a shotgun blast to the chest and not die. I’d just as soon not test the theory, but it is kind of nice to think that that little bit of insurance is in my tool box. To actually kill me, you need to either sever my head, or pierce my heart with a weapon made from cold-treated iron—whatever the heck that is. I feel comfortable sharing that with you because you will either dismiss this as just another one of “those” stories that are so popular right now, or you just won’t ever feel the need to go out and hunt down a ghoul that is trying to make the world a better place.

  So once I could hear again, Lisa assured me that she did not actually hear a thing. She was really glad when my hearing came back. I guess I am one of those women with a naturally loud voice.

  So back to my basement. As I told you, I am a ghoul. I eat the dead. To be clear, they have to be “unprocessed.” I don’t know if you are aware of what they do to a person before spray painting them and stuffing them in a box, but no ghoul would ever touch a body after a mortician got ahold of it. I keep about a half dozen corpses on ice for those times when I can’t go out and hunt down a fresh meal.

  This is another of the perks from that job I did for Belinda-the-vampire-bitch. She occasionally has one of her minions bring by a thrall that might have been snacked on a bit too heavily or the chance human version of a monster that they might stumble across. I had no idea that so many icky beasties maintain human form and transform under whatever weird circumstance is their trigger: full moons, high tides, the opening day of football season.

  Opening the walk-in refrigerator, I pull the first
body out and set him on the huge table. Already the smell is causing my mouth to water. I know it will just be a moment—

  “Mrrgl.”

  Oh yeah. Sharkmouth makes the scene and I dig in. I can’t really explain it better than that. When I smell a dead body—something that you would probably find repulsive—it is like being in Martha Stewart’s kitchen on Thanksgiving. The smell is beyond delicious.

  My mouth does this thing that sort of defies biology. It stretches out several inches and these three razor-sharp rows of needle-like fangs drop. I become the human equivalent of one of those wood chipper thingies. I can down a whole body in less than ten minutes. The only part that is a bit icky for me is regurging up the clothes. To my credit, I strip the bodies that are put in my fridge. However, I don’t exactly have control over my appetite. When I encounter a dead body out and about, I just can’t help myself.

  The best thing I can equate it to is what used to happen with those spray cans of whip cream. I couldn’t open my fridge when one of those things were in there back when I was alive without grabbing it, popping the top, and shooting a mouthful of tasty, sweet whipped cream into my mouth.

  So anyways, I got my Sharkmouth going, and made short work of my dinner. I think we found this one under a bridge. Probably not the solution to the homeless situation that they were thinking of with Comic Relief; but, in my defense, he was already dead. Being out in the elements is really not something that we are designed for in our human form.

  When I was finished, I went back upstairs. Lisa was already asleep. She was sprawled on the couch, the remote slipping from her fingers. I glanced at the screen long enough to decide that if I ever got the chance, I might break my rule about eating a live human if I ever met the ‘Sham Wow’ guy. I turned off the idiot box and pulled the blanket that was draped over the back of the sofa across Lisa and headed upstairs.

  My room is a marvel. It has shutters that allow in absolutely no sunlight. That way I didn’t have to stay in a rickety closet like I did back in the apartment. One of the drawbacks of being a ghoul is the vampire-like aversion to sunlight. For some reason, it burns like acid if it touches my tender, gray skin. (Although I do keep it airbrushed a golden bronze most times when we are going out in public.)

  “Is this your idea of living a low key life?” a familiar voice whispered from the darkness.

  I did my best not to shriek. However, I have this thing that happens when I get scared. My toenails and fingernails turn to three-inch claws. I’ve ruined more shoes in the past several months…

  “Morgan, I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I managed to say. Sometimes I went all sharkmouth, too, depending on how scared I got.

  So that brings me to another of my abilities. I can totally see in the dark. And not Paris Hilton sex-tape vision. I can see in the dark like a normal person can in the daylight. However, for some strange reason, Morgan is invisible to me when she chooses. It is like she wraps herself in the darkness and vanishes. Also, I can hear. I’m talking footsteps of a fly on the other side of the wall type stuff. It is like having a radio tuner in my head. I just scan the area, and I can pick up on things as far as a few blocks away. (I know this because Lisa and I played this game one night where she kept walking and talking in a whisper until I couldn’t hear her.) However, like her ability to evade my sight, Morgan can also be so quiet that I can’t hear her so much as breathe. (And she does, because I watched her chest one time to see if it rose and fell…it did.)

  “And I will remind you that I am the authority in these parts and keep my own council.”

  Bitchy mood, I thought. Great, just what I need. What I said was, “So what brings you to my house tonight? I know it isn’t to hang out and do each other’s hair and nails.” To emphasize my point, I kicked off my newest pair of ruined Nikes.

  “It seems that there has been a disturbance.” Morgan moved into view. Now when I say that, what I mean is that she went from being invisible to standing three feet away from me in the blink of an eye.

  “In the Force?” I scoffed and sat on the edge of my bed to pull my shredded socks off my feet. Bummer, these were the ones with the cute little roses on the toes. I kind of liked those socks.

  “Your attempts at humor have not gotten any better.” Morgan walked to my door and pulled it shut.

  “Neither has your attitude,” I shot back. “You sent me on a job with the high likelihood that I would die, but that I would do enough damage so your precious little vampire could come in and finish the job.”

  “Not true,” Morgan countered. “We gave you a fifty-fifty chance.”

  “You still sent me in underprepared and with the thought that my death would be an acceptable loss.”

  “We paid you very handsomely for your services.” Morgan gave me a dismissive wave. I wondered, and not for the first time, if I could take her in a fight.

  “Lot of good that would have done me if I were dead.”

  “You are dead.”

  I have no idea how long I stood there with my mouth open. I desperately wanted to fire off a witty comeback. Sadly, that is not really my strong suit. Instead, I went to what I felt I did best. I glared.

  “I suppose you came here with a purpose?” I finally said after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence that was probably worse on me than on the emotionally stunted Morgan.

  “I have.” Morgan took a seat in the over-stuffed easy chair. She settled in and went so far as to grab the handle on the side and recline! Talk about making yourself comfortable. “There has been an incident just outside of the city in a little town called Estacada.”

  I had grown up in the Portland area. There are several little towns on the fringe that are mostly full of loggers, and, as of late, meth cooks. Back in the Seventies, there were always stories of people growing marijuana out in the forests. Supposedly they had the farms booby-trapped and if they caught trespassers, they just killed them and left the body for the animals. It was the Pacific Northwest’s equivalent to moonshining, I guess. If you believe the stories, that is.

  “When you say incident…” I let that hang in the air and become my question.

  “I have been…” Morgan paused. For just a second, I thought I saw something flit across her face that almost looked like an emotion. Seriously, this lady could make Mr. Spock look like a Jerry Springer guest when it came to containing emotional expression. “I have been informed that there may be zombies in the woods.”

  I looked at Morgan, and then I pulled out my phone and tapped the screen to wake it up. Yep, it was the middle of March. That would rule out April Fool’s. I tucked my phone away.

  “Zombies?” I tried not to sound like I thought she was full of it, but I’m not sure how well I managed to hide my skepticism. “Like Dawn of the Dead zombies, or like Serpent and the Rainbow zombies?”

  I was so proud of myself. I was never into the whole scary movie kick when I was human. Honestly, I was a giant scairdy cat. Those sorts of things gave me nightmares. Now, heck, I’d done battle with an honest-to-goodness vampire. I’d spoken to a few ghosts, and I live with a teenage girl. Movie monsters had nothing on my reality. Since Morgan had let it slip that a lot of what most people would consider popular fiction had some basis in reality, I decided that I would do some homework. Turns out Lisa was a big fan of the stuff. So I let her pick the selections for movie night.

  “We aren’t sure yet,” Morgan said with all seriousness.

  “Wait! What?”

  “There has only been one report and it was made by a witch that has a propensity for sipping a bit too much hemlock tea.”

  I was pretty sure that hemlock was some type of poison, but I could worry about that later. Morgan was talking about zombies. Worse, when I asked what type, her answer leads me to believe that there is more than one type of zombie! That tops poison drinking witches in my book.

  “So what am I supposed to do? Do I go out there with a shotgun and blow their brains out?” I said with as much of a laugh as
I could muster.

  “I imagine that would be one way to deal with the situation,” Morgan said with her usual lack of emotion.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am absolutely serious. Do I strike you as somebody who jokes?”

  I tried to imagine Morgan even smiling and it gave me a bit of a chill. It would probably be like a shark’s smile…the last thing you ever saw before you became a snack. There was something about this woman that was just the most pure form of scary. And she was a tiny little thing. And then it dawned on me who she reminded me of: Carol Kane in that Bill Murray movie, Scrooged. She was that ghost or fairy, or whatever the heck she was supposed to be. But when she hit Bill Murray with that toaster, I laughed so hard I think I peed my pants just a little bit. She even had a voice very similar to Ms. Kane. Of course I would never tell her that. The only reason that I am sharing it with you here is because I know that she will never stoop to reading any of my books.

  “So what in the world would zombies be doing here? And what am I supposed to do if I find one?”

  “If I had all of these answers, do you think that I would be here asking you to investigate? That is what you are going to be paid for, Ava.”

  “So am I supposed to just investigate, or am I supposed to kill something?”

  “I imagine that will be determined once you go check things out,” Morgan said with a sigh as she unreclined (is that even a word?) from the recliner and stood up. “Perhaps I have overestimated your abilities. Maybe I should find somebody else.”

  I thought about that last seven figure paycheck. Considering the fact that I had worked as a waitress, and a good night was when I walked out with a hundred bucks, I decided that I wouldn’t have a problem taking a drive out to Estacada to look for zombies. My only concern was Lisa.

  “You might want to leave your pet human at home,” Morgan said.

  I know she told me that she isn’t a fortune teller or a mind reader, but that was just too spooky. I think she had a good point, though. If these were the Dawn of the Dead-type of zombie, I would feel just terrible if Lisa got bit and turned into one of those things. Of course that brought me to another question.