Except for the fact that he had to get out of town, now, before anyone figured out that Boston was infested with zombies and started tracking them all down. And as for where he’d go-- he’d figure that out once he was at the Greyhound station.
What he wanted, of course, was to go home. Charleston. It almost might be worth it to see the look on Sam's face. Hi, Sam! Surprise! And his dad would be happy to see him, at least outwardly, that big bluff, How-are-you-doing-son, thump you on the back, but that cold, appraising look in his eyes-- and his mom, who was looking more tired and wary every time he saw her, like she was just waiting for him to break her heart again--
No, he couldn't go home. But where was he going? Somewhere with a lot of cemeteries, he guessed.
And then what happens? Lisa had said. Are you going to live like this forever? Jack picked up a dirty sock from the floor and started chewing on it.
“That poor man,” said Lisa. “They’re starving him, and they don’t even know it.”
“They don't care.” He put the sock back in his mouth. It was very soothing. Maybe he could bring it with him.
“We ought to help him.”
Oh, he thought. Because he hadn’t come here to say goodbye to Lisa, had he? He’d come here so she could talk him out of it.
But how was he supposed to--
A grin slowly spread across his face.
“What?”
“You want to help that man.”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
“Do you want to do something really, really stupid?”
“Absolutely.”
“Can I borrow forty bucks to buy a used suit?”
She raised her eyebrows at him.
#
Prof. Leschke paced around the lab like a big, angry lion in a lab coat. Not good, thought Ian.
“Let me get this straight,” he growled. “There were at least forty zombies, and you didn’t capture any of them?”
“I shot one,” said Ian.
“Did you catch it?”
Ian shook his head. Sarah winced.
“Why haven't you fixed this yet? What if one of your zombies eats somebody?"
“Well, technically, they’re not our zombies. It’s not like they do our bidding.”
Prof. Leschke came up to Ian and rested his hand on his shoulder. It might have looked friendly, but it felt like the prelude to a blow. “Why don’t I kick both of you out right now?”
“Because you’re in just as much trouble as we are,” said Sarah.
Prof. Leschke dropped his hand from Ian’s shoulder and turned towards her.
“Forget I said that,” said Sarah.
Yes, reflected Ian, this could get worse, if the Board of Overseers ever found out. Ian didn't even want to think about what would happen if they knew the truth, but it wasn't just going to involve leaving with a terminal master's degree. It was going to be a lot more terminal than that...
There was a story that one of the gargoyles on the outside of Memorial Hall had cracked and lost a wing, and embedded in the concrete, there'd been a human bone. As if the gargoyle had been a real person transmogrified, mostly, into stone. Another Leschke student swore he'd seen it with his own eyes, before the Winthrop guys in white jumpsuits cut the gargoyle off the building and took it away.
It had to be just a story, right? Right?
“Have you even tried the new antivirus yet?” said the professor.
“We’ve been having some trouble administering it to the test patient,” said Ian. “He’s becoming increasingly unsuitable.” Please don’t make me go in the basement, professor.
“Do it,” snarled Prof. Leschke.
#
Here Lisa was in the black suit she wore to funerals-- and looking wicked smart, if she did say so herself-- holding a satchel packed with a rotting human leg, and pretending to be a journalist from the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
What a great way to spend her day off! Usually all she did on Monday was her laundry. And hockey practice, of course. And then beer with the team, to celebrate the fact that they still had most of their teeth.
If Jack’s plan went like they hoped, she’d be out in plenty of time for practice. She and Jack would enjoy the press conference with all the real journalists, and then when they were taken in to see the patient, she would abandon her enormous satchel in the room. Hopefully Todd would figure out what to do with it before anyone got curious about what it was or how it got there.
And she’d learned something new about her employee: he’d done this before. He’d been a journalist before he died, or something like it, because he’d known what their faked credentials should look like, and what to carry, and what to wear, and all the sort of things that you only learned by experience. And he wore a suit like he was used to it. Money, she thought. He used to be rich.
Another little nugget of information that she could chew over, as she whiled away the hours spending way too much time thinking about Jack.
#
Memphis Commercial Appeal, repeated Jack to himself. If he didn’t watch out, he was going to slip up and say--
Here he was again, and he felt his body itch to take up its old habits. Legal pad securely held in the left hand, black ballpoint spinning in the right, its metronomic shuttle calming him while he waited for the press conference to start. It was times like this that he missed the thump of his heart in his chest. It was so quiet inside him now! No sound but his own thoughts, Here I am again, Memphis Commercial Appeal.
He’d been to Memphis once, but he couldn’t remember much after his first drink at the Tonga Club. Part of that great dark smear of the last year of his life, like cockroach guts on white kitchen tile. But all that was over and done now, and in another state, and it was over over over.
He was so jittery he felt like he could tear his skin in half, right down the middle. If the press conference didn’t start soon, he was going to rip open that damned satchel and eat the leg himself.
#
Ian took the coin out of his pocket. “Call it in the air,” he said, and tossed the coin.
“Heads,” said Sarah.
The coin landed on the lab bench.
“Shit,” she said.
#
As far as Lisa could tell, the doctor hadn’t said anything interesting yet. Jack didn’t look impressed either-- his pen was flying around his hand like an angry hummingbird. Then, with a jolt, the pen stopped spinning, and it rose to the ceiling in Jack’s hand.
What the hell are you doing? she thought.
“Yes, you in the back,” said the doctor.
She watched Jack turn on every ounce of charm and charisma in his body. He grinned at the doctor. “Good morning, sir. I’m Jack Kershaw of the Memphis Commercial Appeal.” Now all the other journalists were watching him. Drawn in like magnets. “I’d like to know what you all have ascertained about the nature of his condition.”
"I'm sorry," said the doctor. "Because of patient confidentiality..."
Jack held up his hand and interrupted. "Return of the Living Dead? One of my favorites. What did they say in the movie? 'You have no pulse, your blood pressure's zero-over-zero, you have no pupillary response, no reflexes and your temperature is 70 degrees.'"
"You looked that up," said Lisa.
"Of course," said Jack. "So, those are Mr. Masters's symptoms?"
"In the past, I may have spoken out of turn," said the doctor, watching the PR person's face. "Because of patient confidentiality, I can't comment."
"Then why are you here?" mumbled Lisa.
Jack patted her on the arm. "If he's a zombie, does he eat people?"
The PR lady swiped the microphone. "I can assure you, Mr. Kershaw, that all patients at MGH are given a diet standard throughout the hospital industry. Soylent green not included. Now if anyone else has a question..."
Let it go, thought Lisa. Where was Jack going with this, anyway? He'd always been the one who said that zombies would be better off if no one
knew they existed. So what was he doing asking all these questions?
The same reason that every time she visited someone's house, she ended up in the kitchen, helping her hostess cook. If you spend your whole life turning yourself into something, the training takes over.
"You know what I've never understood," said Jack, as if the PR lady hadn't spoken. "Why would zombies eat human flesh? There's nothing in there that you don't get from a ham sandwich. Is there any kind of scientific explanation for zombieism?"
The PR lady was having some kind of coughing fit, but the doctor stared at Jack as if hypnotized.
Hey, Mr. Let's-Stay-Underground? Time to shut up now, thought Lisa. She kicked his leg, but he just ignored her, all his attention focused on the doctor. She'd probably have to kick him a lot harder for him to feel it.
Lucky she was wearing heels. She was getting ready to try again when the doctor spoke.
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, “but-- Mr. Kershaw?-- are you all right? You don’t look at all well. Your skin is cyanotic, and your breathing...”
For a moment Jack looked surprised. Then he clutched his chest. “My heart!” he gasped. He rolled his eyes back in his head and dropped bonelessly to the floor.
Thunk! Reporter down! Everyone, including the doctor, started pushing his way through the crowd to the stricken man.
Plan B, thought Lisa, as she picked up her satchel.
ch. 11
If the first thing a physician learns is to do no harm, the first thing an academic learns is never to lie. Your career can survive plagiarism, ineptitude, and a complete disinterest in teaching, but fraud will kill you every time.
What Prof. Sonia Thal had done wasn’t fraud, exactly. She had never actually said that she had discovered the first novel written by an enslaved African-American man. She had said that she had found a document that IF VERIFIED WOULD BE the first novel written by an enslaved African-American man. She had pointed out that while many of the details in the manuscript APPEARED TO BE based on verifiable fact, they might be pure coincidence.
What she had not said, of course, is that she had written the entire thing herself, first on her computer, and then on a stack of antique paper she’d purchased on eBay, then hidden the manuscript in her attic for six months so it got good and dusty, before springing it on the world. It was a good novel, too, and it revealed the tensions of race and gender and class in the 1820s so well that if it wasn’t authentic, it deserved to be. She had even thought of abandoning her original plans and printing the book as fiction, but you didn’t do that kind of thing before getting tenure, especially at Winthrop.
Fiction is for liars and amateurs. Real books have footnotes.
[1]
The thing was, she didn’t have a choice. Associate professors never got tenure at Winthrop-- you gave them seven years of your life, and you got a line on your CV and a swift boot to one of the University of North Dakota’s satellite campuses. But Sonia had a house, and a cat, and furniture, and a favorite coffeehouse where they didn’t play the music too loud, and she wasn’t leaving Boston for anybody. So she had to find something pretty spectacular...
The problem was that she had gotten greedy. No American was writing good novels in the 1820s, unless you counted James Fenimore Cooper, and Sonia certainly didn’t, except for, maybe, maybe, The Pioneers (1823). If she’d set it twenty years later with the Transcendentalists and Hawthorne, she would have had a better chance. But as it was, it felt like every English professor was out to get her.
In the end, it was the agricultural historians who brought her down. It turned out that the climactic scene with the McCormick reaper in the background was totally anachronistic. And then the gun nuts weighed in, and she’d given a minor character a Winchester rifle to hold, which was, unfortunately, completely impossible.
And her timing had been terrible, too. In the same year, a couple of historians had been found to have falsified data-- one of them had supposedly found probate inventories which didn’t exist because they had burned up, dramatically enough, in the San Francisco earthquake of 1909. And another man had interleaved his histories of the Vietnam War with personal reminiscences of the conflict, when he’d spent his whole stint as a professor at West Point. Reporters like when things come in threes, and Sonia became the perfect capstone to their articles.
When the investigation was completed, Sonia was pretty sure that she wouldn’t be teaching at Winthrop come fall. But she was surprised when the outside investigator, a friendly guy from Brown who kept showing pictures of his baby daughter to everyone, leaned in and whispered in her ear that the report was coming out on Monday and she should leave town before then. “Don’t bring your stuff,” he said. “Just leave it. Just go.”
Of course she hadn’t listened. She’d play this out, she’d collect her last paycheck, and then she’d figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
She had never thought about doing anything else. The life so short, the craft so hard to learn...
Holding her engraved summons from the Board of Overseers in her left hand, Sonia scanned the list of names apparently engraved on the slate wall. There it was. SONIA THAL. She touched the name and it melted under her fingertip into nothingness. One of the slate panels slid back, revealing an ancient elevator. There was no one inside. Apparently it was waiting for her.
Sonia stepped inside and could feel the elevator bounce downwards slightly. But the door didn’t close. Then she realized that it was one of those ancient elevators that only worked when the inner metal cage snapped into place. She closed the creaking metal cage, the outer door shut, and without Sonia even pressing a button, the elevator began to move downwards. Could this be right? But there was no button for her to press.
The door opened on an ancient hallway hewn from slate walls. She had never been anywhere this old in the university, and there was something claustrophobic about the place, like it had been built by a smaller generation of men. And it smelled strange, like ancient dirt, the sort of dirt that reminds you that every piece of soil in the world was once part of an animal or a plant, and most of the world has been dead a very long time.
“What’s going on?” she said, to the portly man in the grey pinstripe suit, mopping his face with a white linen handkerchief. Mr. Dudley. That was his name. Head of the Board of Overseers. She'd seen him once or twice at faculty events, and he'd sent her a personal note when she won the James Russell Lowell Prize.
Perhaps she should be more polite to him, but her nerves were on edge.
“Dr. Thal,” said Mr. Dudley. “You’ve been of some embarrassment to our university.”
Dr., not Professor. “I don’t expect to continue my employment--” she said.
“I assume you read your entire contract before you signed it?” he interrupted.
She shook her head. “Why would I?”
He smiled at her. “No one ever does. Except for the Law School. They’re something of a problem for us, as you might imagine. Oh, well. No need to disturb you further, Dr. Thal.”
She felt something hard and heavy at the small of her back. “Just walk this way, doctor,” said a man behind her.
No, this wasn't right. This was Winthrop, and there weren't guns here. Didn't they even have signs in the Square that read, "Violence-Free Zone?" "That can't be a gun," she said, and started to turn around to look.
She heard the safety click off, a sound even she could recognize.
She shouldn’t have gotten into the elevator. She should have run, like the guy from Brown said. She should have--
The man shoved her into a room that suddenly zoomed up to twenty feet high, but still had the same ancient slate and dirt smell. Torches in each corner, burning something she couldn’t see. A large piece of slate, roughly hewn into something like a bed. She heard a metal door clang shut behind her. But she could not turn her head.
Before her stood an enormous figure of a man. It looked like the statue of John Winthrop, if he had been t
en feet high, with giant horns, and legs like a goat’s. And if he’d been dead so long that his face had desiccated into paper, like some terrible saint in a religion Sonia didn’t care to understand.
She stood there, gaping at this gigantic creature.
“Dr. Thal,” it said. “Love your work.” And it reached out a grey-clawed hand...
Two days later, her cat, Hutchinson, having realized that food was not forthcoming, escaped through a cellar window, and made his way to the house of a neighbor who was moving west. Renamed Beatnik, he had a very happy life in San Francisco, even though he never succeeded in catching a single seagull.
#
Jack lay comfortably on the metal table, a sheet over his face, a tag on his toe, reflecting that he hadn’t done badly at all at the press conference. Not badly at all. If the doctor hadn’t noticed that he looked like a walking corpse-- oh, if he hadn’t been a doctor, Jack would have shucked him like an oyster.
Maybe there was a way back. Not to all of his old life, of course, but maybe he could find some scrubby little newspaper in Boston that might hire him, or at least let him freelance now and then... Why not? Why couldn’t he? Surely he had enough talent to get a little work.
Because there was a reason he was working under the table, and not at a newspaper. Because using his own name in his own chosen profession was the quickest way for him to be found.
He wasn't ready for them to find him yet. He knew that much, even if he didn't really know what ready would look like. How was he going to say, Sam killed me, but I deserved to die? And he had no idea, absolutely none, what should happen to both of them, or to the Palmetto, whenever he did go home. So it was better to wait until he did know, until it all came clear.
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