"Huh," said Jack. He tilted his head like he was trying to jostle water out of his ear. He could hear it rolling around in there, too. So it wasn't a sinus infection. But he felt good otherwise. Maybe he didn't need his brain as much as he thought. "If I lend you my axe, think you can get it out?"
“Let’s get these guys out of the building first.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Jack and nodded. Jingle jingle jingle.
#
Ian sidled down the hallway, trying to get out of the labyrinth of the building without going by a security camera. He was just going to go home, and then he was going to--
He was going to sit in his favorite chair and watch his collection of Buffy DVDs until he was too tired to blink. And then, and only then, was he going to decide what to do next. Because he might be broke, he might be unemployed, his academic career might be over, but at least he hadn’t been zombified.
That counted as a win, didn’t it? Probably not.
How was he going to explain this to his parents? His stomach tightened at the thought, and he nearly ran into the two people coming the other way down the hall.
Prof. Leschke and his wife. His zombie wife, draped on her husband’s arm, kept giggling like she was a little bit drunk. How did you get a zombie drunk?
“Oh, hi, professor,” blathered Ian. “I hope it’s okay I got out of your office. I’m just going to go home now, okay?”
“Aaargh,” said Prof. Leschke.
It was only then that Ian noticed there was something wrong with Prof. Leschke. Maybe it was the bluish complexion, or the way his head kept tilting over, or-- what was that smeared all over his lab coat, and why was Mrs. Leschke’s dress all torn up--
“Okay!” said Ian. “Going now!”
Prof. Leschke grabbed Ian by the arm-- Too tight!-- and Ian shut his eyes.
#
“I don’t like this room,” said Arturo, looking around at the slate walls engraved with an endless list of names. “Too exposed.”
It was a creepy room-- at least three stories of open space, as if designed to make Jack feel even shorter than usual. Under the Gothic ceiling was a set of stained glass windows: a soldier enlisting, with an angel standing behind him; the soldier in uniform, with his mother sobbing at his knee, and another angel; the soldier in battle, with angel covering her eyes; and the angel raising the soldier's corpse, like a winged weightlifter. Under that was a very long list of places, like Gettysburg, Antietam, Bull Run. And a lot of Yankee last names with no friendly Gaillards and Pinckneys and Middletons to keep them company.
This was no kind of a place for a southern zombie to waste time. “Help me open the door so we can get out,” said Jack, slamming into the locked cast-iron doors, leaving a big divot in the metal.
Arturo thudded into the door beside him. The other zombies, too hungry to focus on anything for long, wandered aimlessly around, murmuring. One zombie in a silver tracksuit stood next to a table covered with piles of announcements: guest speakers, parties, pizza delivery menus. He picked up a piece of paper and ate it.
Jack could see the door start to warp, the lock begin to slide free. “Nearly out,” said Arturo.
And then what? thought Jack. He could try going back to Lisa’s. She’d probably chase him down with a butcher knife. Now there was an image. Lisa with a butcher knife, and a big white apron. And what would she be wearing underneath? Lingerie? No, she wasn’t the lingerie type. A pair of jogging shorts, the kind made out of the really thin rayon that would rip just like tissue paper.
So he catches her from behind, and he rips the shorts, and she spins around and stabs him, and he bleeds all over the starched white apron... Oh, Jesus...
Focus! Focus! he reminded himself. She’ll probably just shoot you again.
Maybe not in the head this time, maybe in the stomach, so he can’t move his legs, drops to the ground, flat on his back, can’t move, and she comes over to him, crawling on all fours, her apron trailing in his blood and gore, she straddles him...
He thudded into the door again with renewed purpose. The doors swung open with a groan and then stopped, held in place by the chains that bolted through the door handles.
Jack heard a strange noise behind him, like the door of a pyramid opening, and then a buzz like an ancient doorbell. The slate name-covered walls had slid aside, and behind each one was an open elevator containing a Winthrop man. And this time they were holding something that looked like giant water guns. Jack and Arturo both ducked out of the way, but the zombie in the silver tracksuit eating the notice about the vice president's visit to campus wasn’t so lucky; the brownish spray caught him full in the back, flaying the skin from his body, liquefying him into a horrible pink gelatin. It had happened so quickly that the poor fellow didn’t even have a chance to scream, but Jack wouldn’t soon forget the smell.
“Back downstairs,” yelled Arturo, pulling one of the other zombies with him.
Jack couldn't run. One of the Winthrop men had his gun pointed at him, from about six feet away. "Halt, zombie!" he yelled.
Oh, hell, thought Jack. I'm going to die. He put his hands up and what he hoped was a big friendly smile on his face.
The Winthrop man walked closer to him. Why didn't he fire? Maybe it was like a squirt gun. Maybe it took a minute to reload. In which case--
Jack turned and bolted down the stairs, feeling droplets of acid splash across his back, innocent as water, then burning into him like wormtrails of fire. He could feel his leg bones crack, the worst shin splints ever, but he ignored it until he slammed the door behind him, and slid his axe between the door handles.
“That’s not going to hold it,” said Arturo, jamming the door shut with a man-sized tank of liquid nitrogen.
Jack grabbed another tank and blocked the door with it.
“How are we going to get out of here?" Arturo added. "There’s only one exit. Do you know how many fire regulations this place breaks?”
“We could take the elevator,” said Jack.
As if on cue, the elevator signal pinged. The two men looked at each other, and Jack picked up another tank, ready to swing it like a baseball bat.
With a rumble the doors opened. “Don’t shoot!” Ian cried, his hands in the air. “I’ve come to help!”
“Why?” asked Jack.
“If I do,” said Ian, “Prof. Leschke is going to let me graduate. Can you believe it? I’m going to be Dr. Comanor, Ph.D.! Wait until I tell Mom!”
ch. 25
When she was a teenager, Sarah Chen had mixed Clorox and Drano to see what would happen, and had woken up with aching mucus membranes and eighty per cent of her lung capacity. She felt pretty much the same as she opened her eyes to find that she was sprawled in a chair in a wood-paneled room, with a bunch of old white guys staring at her.
"Am I in hell?" she asked, gingerly touching what felt like a black eye. She'd never had a black eye before. And it would be totally okay with her if she never had one again.
"I am Mr. Dudley, Miss Chen," said the man in the center of the ring. "I speak for the Board of Overseers."
She had to try it. She had to know how far she would get if she ran. And now she knew. They'd caught her effortlessly, snatching her from the Greyhound bus station in New York City, while she wobbled around, drugged up on those damned grandma-baked cookies.
"We need your assistance," said Mr. Dudley.
"I can't imagine why. I'm just a grad student. Surely there's someone more competent--"
"Please don't insult me, Miss Chen. You know we would never have gone to the trouble of collecting you if your services weren't required. And I respect you enough to believe you understand that."
She licked her dry lips. A noiseless servant set a giant pina colada on the small table in front of her. She looked at it but did not drink. "I did my best, sir. I wasn't able to synthesize the antivirus. It's beyond my capacities as a scientist. You'd do better to look elsewhere."
"Prof. Leschke is dead."
"In any case, we didn't bring you here for your scientific services. You've been behaving in an uncharacteristic manner, Miss Chen. You didn't get into Winthrop by going to nightclubs. Have you come to believe that life is short?" A cold, thin smile passed over his plump face. "Or perhaps, unnaturally prolonged?"
She took a sip of her drink, her hand shaking. That was unexpected. They knew she was infected. That killing her wouldn't be enough. Not that she wanted to be a zombie, but walking around under the clear blue sky beat whatever oblivion Mr. Dudley had planned for her.
Burning her body. That would work. Would she feel it?
"Introduce me to your new friends," said Mr. Dudley.
"Why would I talk to you? I'm dead either way. There's nothing you can give me."
"Isn't there, Dr. Chen?"
She bit the inside of her lip so hard she could taste the blood. She was dead and gone either way. What did it matter what he called her? Would it matter to her parents, with their only child dead? She knew them. They would think that Winthrop had broken her. The pressure, the workload. They would think it was their fault, that they should have kept her in California. How sorry she was for what she'd done to them, just for a stupid joke. She wished there was some way they could know that.
All of her chess pieces were gone, and the game was over. Maybe. He'd never said what happened to Ian. Maybe that meant he didn't have Ian yet. At least one of them was going to get out of this. At least she could take care of him one last time.
"Dr. Chen and Dr. Comanor," she said. "Then I talk."
#
All he was doing was standing, staring vacantly, chewing on a piece of paper, and then the acid caught him in the back, and then he started to scream--
Being a ghoul wasn’t that bad, Jack thought, most of the time there were plenty of advantages. All right, he had to eat people, but if you surrounded him with a pile of the hogs and cows and chickens and shrimp that had died to keep his living body motoring along-- hell, you could probably fill a football field with the chickens alone that had been murdered for his sake. Great snowy heaps of murdered birds, miles deep, miles wide...
He carefully lifted the body of the man whose head he’d pounded into the floor and put it into the cage. He wasn’t a medical expert, but the man’s breathing sounded awfully shallow, and there seemed to be a lot of blood leaking out of the back of the man’s head.
Not aging, that was a good thing. Jack knew how often he’d been able to skate along on the basis of his looks. And every year it was a little harder to stay in shape, to keep the hair from colonizing his ears and nose...
The man’s mother was circling Logan, waiting to see her son. But he wasn’t infected. If Jack could infect him, maybe he’d heal. Or he’d die before he could heal and spend eternity as a brain-damaged zombie, a sorry misery to himself.
The last eight months since Jack had died had been like some kind of exceptionally gory Warner Brothers cartoon. He could get mangled and beat up and warped like Wile E. Coyote, and then sprong, back he’d come, ready to chase another beeping Roadrunner. He’d always figured that there was some way he could die, even if it wasn’t anything obvious. And now he knew. And he didn't want to die.
He wanted to live, he wanted to go home, and most of all, he wanted to see Lisa again.
Last chance, Jack thought. He bit off his fingertip and stuck the bleeding stump into the man’s mouth until he felt his finger heal. Then he sat back on his haunches, his hand over his mouth, and watched. His body ached to bolt, but he made himself sit still.
My name is John Lazarus Kershaw, he thought. I’m a reporter from Charleston, South Carolina. I’m not a bad person. I’ve always done more damage to myself than anyone else. This isn’t me, sitting here, over a man I killed, because I was too strong, because I wasn’t paying attention, because I was selfish...
Am I too late? Please please please...
Jack gnawed on his shaking hand until he heard a finger bone snap. He hadn't even felt it. Was it his imagination, or had the terrible bleeding stopped? Was the man’s breathing deeper, did it look less like a coma, more like sleep? He leaned over and sniffed the man’s skin. Sassafras. The infection was taking hold.
“Hey, skinny!” called Arturo. “Help me with these doors!”
#
Lisa walked home from the parking garage, her feet aching. She felt beaten down-- a natural reaction to spending a few hours driving around Boston-- but it was getting worse as she walked back home.
It was dawning on her that yes, she was really infected. And the good part of that was that she had sort of a “get out of jail free” card, and when she had the inevitable Alioto heart attack in her fifties, it wasn’t going to kill her all the way dead.
But she was going to be a zombie. She was going to be out there digging up graveyards along with Jack. Not with Jack. She’d told him to go away so clearly he wouldn't need to be told ever again. She’d be out there with the guy who kept licking her armpit at the meeting.
Depressing. But that was just the nighttime. What would be the daytime? Back at the restaurant, every day, forever.
She couldn’t do it forever. She could do it because her family needed her, and then she could do it in their memory, because there was a little piece of her mother and father there, but just thinking about doing it every day, forever, as the neighborhood changed around her, and all the faces got strange to her, forever and ever and ever...
It was the loneliest thought she’d ever had.
She stopped in front of Alioto’s Pizza, and for the first time in a long time, she looked around her. There was Alioto’s Pizza, the same old place it had always been. And there was Stu’s spa, which hadn’t changed for as long as she could remember. But beyond that--
A very expensive shoe store, where they looked at her funny every time she went in and asked for a size eleven until she gave up.
A vintage clothing store where nothing was larger than a six, and all the clothes looked like they’d belonged to Jackie Kennedy.
A place where you could buy pretty good cupcakes at six dollars a pop.
A “chef-driven bistro,” the third one in the space in three years.
A place to get your nails done, at $10 a nail.
She’d lived here, right here, all her life, but it wasn’t her home anymore. And now that she noticed, she was amazed at how long it had taken her to see it. She shivered, and saw the short dark-haired man leaning against the side of the door to her restaurant. Jack, she thought, and accelerated towards him. She wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss him, or shake him, or what--
But now that she was closer, she could see that it wasn’t him. This man could have been his older brother-- a little less attractive, a little balder. And he dressed just like Matlock. She couldn’t even imagine Jack dressing like that if he lost a bet.
“Are you Miss Alioto?” the man asked. He had Jack’s funny accent, too.
“Come on inside,” she said, pulling out the keys to the restaurant.
ch. 26
“I’m Jack’s cousin,” said the man in the blue seersucker Matlock suit. “Sam Lazarus.”
Lisa shook his outstretched hand. It felt strangely warm to her. Normal, and she felt a moment of loneliness for cold-bodied Jack, wherever he was. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I want you to help me find my cousin.”
Since she didn’t know this man-- even if he was obviously related to Jack-- her first instinct was not to help him. “I don’t know where he is.”
“Stu down the street said Jack worked here.”
“Did work here. I fired him a week ago.”
Sam sighed and rubbed his forehead. “He disappeared more than half a year ago. Left no word with his family. And-- I don’t know what Jack told you before you hired him-- this wouldn’t be completely out of character. I heard that a former employee of ours spotted him in Boston a couple of weeks ago. But she didn't kn
ow anything else. You know how I tracked him down? He still gets the Palmetto. Or he did, through Stu's corner store over there.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He looked directly at her, and again those bright blue eyes, a strange vivid blue, reminded her of Jack. “I want you to get a sense of how important it is to me to find my cousin, Miss Alioto. I’m not doing this lightly. His father is dying, and he needs to come home.”
She chewed on her lip. “Does he know?”
“I don’t see how he could,” said Sam. “As far as I can tell, he hasn’t spoken with anyone since the day he disappeared.”
Disappeared, thought Lisa. They don’t have any idea what happened, do they? She’d always wondered how Jack left it-- a bloodstained suit of clothes on the floor of his house? No, he was a smart man, smart enough to make it look like he’d bolted, not like he’d been stabbed to death by whoever had killed him. Which would be better for his parents, she wondered? “How much time does he have?”
Sam shook his head. “We don’t know. Not much.”
“I’ve got Jack's cell number.”
“I’ve got it, too. He doesn’t answer, and the mailbox is full.”
Was she going to help this guy? Put it another way. Did she believe this guy? “I can drive you over to his apartment. He’s across the river, over in Everett.”
Sam smiled at her. For a moment, he looked like Jack.
#
Sloane walked along the Charles River, trying to figure out what to do next. She'd had a great semester, but it was all falling apart. It had been fun pretending to be the only daughter of wealthy flour-mill heirs, and all the parties at Locke-Ober had been great, but now there were six messages on her cell phone from the president of the Jubilee Club, wanting to talk to Sloane, in her position as treasurer. She could hear the question even if it wasn't exactly stated-- "Where did all the money go, Sloane? We started the semester with twenty thousand dollars, and it's all gone, and where did it all go?"
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