Broken Shadows

by Tim Waggoner

  As she ran through the mall corridors, she tried to keep her psychic blinders up, but she couldn’t shut out the images she saw. A fat woman holding a toddler with his face buried in her stomach flab, arms and legs flailing as he smothered. A group of people standing outside a sporting goods store, inserting fish hooks into the naked flesh of an old man who kept shouting, “Deeper, dammit, deeper!” Another group of people inside a pet store, skinning animals with their bare hands, eating the meat and wearing the bloody pelts like hats. And there was more, so much more, but it all merged into a twisting, swirling kaleidoscope of blood and madness. But just when Cherie thought she never would reach the exit, that maybe there wasn’t an exit any longer, she rounded a corner and saw the central fountain—water spraying into the air to splash back down into the marble basin filled with water, at the tiled bottom a scattering of coins tossed in by people who didn’t really believe in wishes but couldn’t help themselves. The mall’s main entrance lay just on the other side of the fountain. She’d made it! She’d—

  Cherie stopped running. Standing in front of the fountain, between her and the exit, was a clown. Red shirt, rainbow pants held up by orange suspenders, overlarge brown shoes, white pouch slung over one shoulder. His shirt wasn’t just red, she saw, but a red polo, and his face—a face she’d seen in IM only a short while ago—was now covered by a mass of red-and-blue squiggles, as if he’d been tattooed in crayon.

  The man, the clown, the whatever-he-was saw her, grinned, and waved.

  “Hi, Cherry! Told you I had some things to do!”

  He reached into his pouch and pulled out a slender purple balloon. He stretched it a couple times, put it to his mouth and began filling it with air. The balloon expanded, lengthened, and the tip split into three separate tendrils. Mr. Polo continued blowing, and the tendrils kept growing, writhing away from him as they became increasingly longer, as if possessing life of their own. Then the tendrils reared up as if they were serpents and lunged toward a trio of nearby shoppers: an elderly man on a motorized scooter, a pre-teen girl wearing a Johnny Depp T-shirt, and a pot-bellied guy dressed in a light-blue work shirt and tie. The balloon tentacles wrapped around each of the trio’s waists and hoisted them into the air. The scooter fell out from under the old man as the balloons, with a strength and force they couldn’t possibly possess, lifted the three over the fountain and slammed their bodies together over and over again until they were reduced to limp meat bags filled with shattered bones. The balloon-tentacles then released the bodies and they dropped into the fountain. Water splashed, and Mr. Polo—balloon now out of his mouth, end pinched tight so no air would escape—looked at Cherie and grinned.

  “Make a wish,” he said.

  Cherie ran like hell toward the entrance, hoping that if she moved fast enough, she could bypass Mr. Polo and make it past the fountain—without looking at the bloody, broken ruins that had only a few moments ago been three human beings. She didn’t know if she’d be any safer outside than inside—what if the whole fucking world had gone nuts?—but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t take any more of this insanity.

  “Not so fast, Cherry!” Mr. Polo put the end of the balloon back in his mouth and started to blow once more. The three blood-smeared tentacles shot straight toward Cherie like rubbery missiles. With the speed of striking snakes, they encircled her waist once, twice, three times, and, though filled with nothing more substantial than air, held her in a grip like iron. She could no longer run, couldn’t move, could barely even breathe…

  Slowly, the balloon tentacles began to pull her back toward Mr. Polo, and though she tried to resist, they drew her inexorably on until she was standing right next to the psychotic fuck. Though her arms were pinned to her sides, she imagined they were free and pictured herself reaching into his pouch, pulling out a handful of limp, empty balloons, and jamming them into his mouth, shoving in one handful after another, until the crazy sonofabitch choked to death.

  “That’s right, that’s the stuff…” Mr. Polo’s eyes gleamed with a wild light, and he practically purred his words. “You create such lovely mental images, Cherry. When I first sensed them, I knew you were just like me: a hungry-hungry worm gnawing his way through the sweet, fat apple of creation. When you were in kindergarten, Mrs. Gall Stone taught you the most important lesson you ever learned: that anything can happen at any time, and it all means dick. You were gifted with a great insight into the true nature of existence, Cherry, but you turned your back on it. You denied the truth and became like them…” He gestured at the crowd of people that thronged the mall. No longer were they lunatics attacking or mutilating whatever moved. They had returned to their normal banal selves. Near-mindless creatures whose only purpose in life was to spend money, eat fast food, hold empty conversations on cell phones, and send meaningless e-mails with smiley-face icons after every other word.

  “Worse than them, really, for you acted as if you were above them, as if you and your pathetic little tribe of Halloween-costumed playmates were the only ones who knew what true darkness was. You did know once, Cherry, when you were baptized by the blood of an insane kindergarten art teacher dying from an inoperable brain tumor. And when I wandered into your store and saw the delicious dark images in your mind…” He trailed off and smiled. “I thought I’d do you a favor and remind you of what you’d forgotten, sister. So, what’s it going to be? Are you going to force yourself to forget your lesson again this time, make it go away and be never-was? Or are you going to finally embrace the truth and become what you were always truly meant to be?”

  Cherie stared into Mr. Polo’s gleaming eyes for several moments. She thought of Mrs. Galston, of the clown picture with the red-and-blue squiggles on its face, of Heather, and Kirk, and her dull-as-fuck job at IM. Then she smiled and raised a hand that had been empty a moment ago, but which now held a pair of black-handled scissors.

  “What do you think?”

  * * *

  Heather was just about finished applying a second coat of Grave Mold nail polish to her fingers when Cherie came back from lunch.

  “Did Kirk find you?” Heather didn’t look up as Cherie approached the counter. “I told him you’d probably be at the food court.”

  When Cherie didn’t answer, Heather scowled. “What’s wrong? Need a refresher course in manners?”

  “I’ve already had my refresher course for the day, thanks.”

  There was something odd about Cherie’s voice. It sounded normal enough, but it grated on Heather’s ears, made her wince as if she were hearing fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard.

  “Would you like to hear what I learned?”

  Heather finally looked up, blinking painfully as she tried to get her sore eyes to focus. She wondered what was wrong with her vision. Was she starting to get sick or something? Maybe. That would account for the awful taste in her mouth, too. She decided she would stop off at Urgent Care after work.

  “What are you…” Heather trailed off when she saw the lopsided smile on Cherie’s face and, though she wasn’t sure, it looked like Cherie’s eye-blinks were no longer in sync. There was some kind of oozy red glop on her T-shirt, too, crimson smeared across the A for anarchy.

  And she was holding a pair of scissors.

  “Today I learned about the difference between inside and outside. Let me give you a demonstration.” Cherie raised the scissors and stepped around behind the counter.

  * * *

  Cherie gazed down at her handiwork which lay on the floor, surrounded by a widening pool of blood, a pool that was definitely outside. She was satisfied; it looked just like she’d pictured it.

  She dropped the scissors onto the body, then reached beneath the counter and took hold of the plastic bag that she’d placed there earlier. She didn’t want to leave Decomposing Dora behind. After all, her new friend had paid for her.

  “The three of us are going to have a lot of fun, aren’t we, Dora?”

  Cherie…no, Cherry walked out from behind
the counter and headed into the mall, thinking of all the wondrously dark pictures she and her friend were going to bring to vivid, blood-soaked life.

  PROVIDER

  “Looks like we got a flopper over there,” Kenny said.

  Robert nodded. He put Smoky Joe into low gear and pressed on the brake. The truck juddered to a stop—damn thing was overdue for a tune-up—in front of 3298 Chestnut Avenue. There was a large oak tree in the yard. Its branches stretched out over the street and its leaves, while still green, were tinted gold, red and brown. Not quite ready to start drifting to the ground yet, but almost. Fall was Robert’s favorite time of the year. It made him think of beginnings, much more so than January first. There was the first day of school, and the start of football season, of course. And given the way stores advertised, it was the unofficial start of the Christmas season, too.

  At least, that’s the way it had been, back when the word dead meant a corpse that didn’t move, didn’t walk, didn’t try to sink its teeth into the living.

  Robert put Smoky Joe in park, but he didn’t turn off the ignition. They needed to leave the truck running so the furnace would keep burning. If it went out, it was a bitch to get started again, and if the temperature in the back got too low, the furnace wouldn’t be able to do its job effectively. He opened the door, and stepped down to the street. He removed his gloves from the pocket of his coveralls and put them on while he waited for Kenny to come around and join him.

  Kenny walked around the front of the truck. He never walked around the back if he could avoid it, and Robert couldn’t say as he blamed the man. Kenny already had his gloves on, and his clear plastic face mask, too.

  “I can’t believe you still wear that goddamn thing. You’ve been on the job six months now.”

  “Five,” Kenny corrected. “And I don’t care if I’m still doing this stinkin’ job five years from now, I’m still gonna wear my mask, and I don’t give a shit what anyone says about it.” Kenny’s breath caused condensation to mist the inside of the mask around his mouth.

  Robert thought the breath-fog made him look kind of stupid, but he didn’t remark on it. No one commented on basic biological processes anymore, whatever they were, not even burping or farting. They were signs that you were alive, and no one made fun of that.

  Kenny was a skinny middle-aged man with a scraggly white mustache and wispy white hair that brushed the tops of his shoulders. He had long, tapering fingers (hidden by his work gloves at the moment) that constantly trembled. Robert didn’t know if that was due to stress or whether Kenny had a drug or alcohol problem. Though these days the real problem for users was getting hold of recreational chemicals.

  Greasy black smoke curled forth from the chimney pipe atop the truck, and flecks of ash drifted through the air. In addition, a nauseating odor somewhat like a backed-up sewer filtered through the neighborhood. Not so many years ago, people would’ve complained like hell about the pollutants and the stench Smoky Joe pumped out. But that was in the old world. Today, there weren’t any such things as environmental protection laws. Well, not unless you counted the kind of work people like Robert and Kenny did.

  “Let’s go take a look,” Robert said.

  Kenny grunted assent, though he didn’t look too pleased.

  They walked up to the oak tree and examined the flopper bound to the trunk. It was held fast against the bark by strong rope, but whoever had put it out hadn’t slipped a muzzle on it. The thing gnashed its teeth at them, straining forward, eager to bite off a hunk of flesh. Robert looked into the corpse’s eyes but they might as well have been made out of glass for all the emotion they displayed. They were fish eyes, dead eyes.

  “Fresh one,” Robert commented. No visible wounds, no sign of rot. “Probably died of a heart attack or a stroke last night.”

  “I don’t give a shit what killed him,” Kenny said. His voice held a strained edge to it, as if he were on the verge of hysteria. He always sounded like this when they had to deal with a flopper. “I hate it when they tie them up like this.”

  The preferred method of preparing someone for pick-up was to put a plastic muzzle over their mouth so they couldn’t bite, then to bind their wrists, ankles and legs with plastic ties. Prepackaged kits were readily available and free to any resident. Robert and Kenny had a bunch stashed under the seat of their truck. They’d handed out four kits so far today during their rounds.

  “Some people can’t bring themselves to truss up their friends and family like a bag of trash,” Robert said. Though once they Went Bad, as the euphemism went, that’s exactly what they were. A scene from an old Monty Python comedy flashed through his mind then, Eric Idle pulling a wooden cart through the muddy streets of a medieval village, ringing a bell and shouting, Bring out your dead! He wondered how long it had been since he’d seen a movie. Years, he supposed.

  “And this is any better?” Kenny nodded toward the flopper who was straining more vigorously against his bonds. He started making a high-pitched keening sound in the back of this throat. It was the sound deaders made when they were hungry—and they were always hungry. Luckily, deaders weren’t any stronger than the living, and no matter how hard the flopper struggled, he wasn’t going to get out of those ropes. Whoever had tied him up had done a good job of it.

  He looked to be—to have been—in his early thirties, thin (most everybody was thin these days, since food wasn’t nearly as plentiful as it used to be), black hair, clean-shaven. He was dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, maroon tie and polished black shoes. Sometimes relatives dressed them up, like they used to do when the dead stayed still and were buried in boxes beneath the ground.

  “Why couldn’t they have done us a favor and bashed his skull in?” Kenny asked. Robert noticed his hands were trembling again, so hard it looked as if he might vibrate right out of his work gloves. Rumor had it that before he’d gone to work as a pick-up man, Kenny’s girlfriend had Gone Bad, and he’d had to put her down. Robert had never asked—it wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask—but if it were true, he wondered why Kenny would do this kind of work. As a way of expunging his guilt, maybe? Or perhaps he was one of those people who was drawn to that which terrified him, like a moth to the flame.

  “It’s not easy to desecrate the body of a loved one, even when you know it’s going to Go Bad soon,” Robert said. The only sure ways to kill a deader were to destroy its brain or burn the damn thing to ash. Not too many folks could bring themselves to do either to the remains of someone they cared about.

  Kenny didn’t respond. He glared at the deader, fear and disgust mingling in his gaze. “Fuckin’ zombie,” he muttered.

  Robert didn’t respond. Instead, he turned and walked back to Smoky Joe. He opened the tool box bolted to the side of the truck and pulled out a rusty crowbar. He walked back to the oak tree, his thick work boots thump-thump-thumping on the ground.

  “Oh, man,” Kenny whined. “Can’t we use the gun?”

  “He’s an easy target. No need to waste the ammo.” He held out the crowbar to Kenny. “Would you like to do the honors this time?”

  “Hell, no. I got the last one.”

  Kenny hadn’t gotten the last one, but Robert decided not to make an issue of it. “Better step back then.” Too bad this fellow’s family didn’t truss him up right, Robert thought. If they had, then Kenny and he could’ve popped the flopper into Smoky Joe’s furnace without having to “kill” him. Ah, well. Every job had its shitty side, he supposed.

  He glanced at the house. The blinds were closed, and he didn’t see anyone peeking out. Good. It was easier when relatives weren’t watching. Robert took aim and swung the bar at the deader’s head. Metal struck hair, flesh and bone with the same sickening sound as a sledgehammer smashing a watermelon. The deader jerked and shuddered with the first blow, but it took three more before the damn thing finally stopped moving.

  When he was finished, Robert lowered the crowbar. His arm was tired and he was breathing heavily. He needed to get
more exercise. He wiped the crowbar off in the grass, then held it out to Kenny.

  “No way am I touchin’ that fuckin’ thing, man.”

  Robert was starting to lose his patience. “You’re a pick-up man, damn it. Do your job.”

  Kenny looked as if he might protest further, but in the end he grabbed the crowbar and headed back to the truck.

  “Get a knife out of the toolbox while you’re at it, will you?” Robert called over his shoulder. “These knots look pretty tight, and I don’t feel like messing with them.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Kenny muttered.

  Robert looked down, saw that the front of his coveralls was splattered with blood. He checked his gloves, saw a few more splatters. Despite razzing Kenny for wearing his face mask, Robert now wished he’d taken the time to put his on. No one was really sure why the dead came back, or why their bite could make someone living Go Bad. He’d heard lots of theories over the years—a genetic weapon cooked up by one government or another, microbes brought back by a space probe, even a mutation of the AIDS virus. But whatever the reason, they did know one thing: it was infectious as hell, and if you weren’t careful, you could Go Bad too.

  He removed his right glove, reached up to touch his face…and found it dry.

  Robert let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Looked like he was going to stay human another day. He put his glove back on, grabbed hold of the corpse under the armpits, and began dragging it toward Smoky Joe.

  * * *

  Come lunchtime, Robert and Kenny sat at a wooden bench in the park. Smoky Joe was parked nearby, engine idling, furnace chugging away, doing its best to reduce Blue Suit to a sooty smear. It wouldn’t take long.