by Curran, Tim
Maybe to add substance to this, Wanda said, “You’re right on that, Mitch, goddamn yes, but you are.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and butted it. She looked from Mitch to Tommy. “Ah, you poor boys! You’ve seen them, haven’t you? You’ve seen those things that tonight will turn this town into a graveyard?”
There was no point in lying to Mother Sepperly and they both knew it. Lying to her was like lying to yourself, like looking into a mirror and proclaiming, that’s not me in there! It’s someone else! You knew better and so would she. So Mitch told her about their experiences at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy, the dead woman in the culvert pipe, all the rest.
“Yes, as I thought, as I thought,” Wanda said.
Tommy stepped forward now, feeling they were indeed on the same page here. “What the hell are they? Zombies?”
That brought a laugh from Wanda that was dry and bitter-sounding. “Zombies? Heh, heh, now that’s a laugh riot indeed! But such words will serve to name them that cannot be named. A zombie is something conjured, I understand, a mindless thing lacking soul and will that chops cane in Guadeloupe and Haiti and such places. Also, a particularly ridiculous shambler of the cinema. But these things? No and yes. I would not name them. You believe they are folks that have come out of their graves to bring evil and make a certain mischief amongst the living, eh?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m thinking.”
Wanda nodded. “Well, you are right and wrong. Yes, they have sheered the veil and come back, but there was no fancy conjuring done, not on purpose, I think. This was not meant to be, but an accident. Listen, Mr. Tommy, them things may have died as Joe Blow or Mary Jane Pissy Pie, but what they’ve returned as is something else indeed. The souls of Joe and Mary have gone traveling, but there are others in the void looking for occupancy. And these were not born as such. No, they are scavengers that have come to roost in the shells of the newly risen…like crows and buzzards attracted to bad meat, these things have been waiting a long time to be born.”
Mitch felt a heaviness in his limbs. He said, “They…they don’t like salt.”
“No, son, and they probably don’t fancy iron nor fire.”
“What should we do?” Tommy asked her.
“I’m not quite sure, son. But I can read the both of you and I know you plan to stand and fight. I will stand with you. But you had better be off to tell the others. They won’t listen, but you can try. And maybe later, you can come back and talk to me. Leave me one of those cigarettes and latch the door on your way out.”
“We can’t just—”
“Leave me here, Mitch? A frail old woman not in her right mind?” Wanda laughed at that, too. “Off with the both of you. When the time is right, I think, you will come back and I will be here.”
10
“Well, now that was a rush,” Tommy said when they were down the walk from Wanda Sepperly’s. “I ain’t got enough trouble with zombies, you bring me to meet the local witch. Greetings, boils and ghouls, hee, hee, hee!”
“Jesus Christ, Tommy, don’t be such an asshole.”
“Well, my mother always said to go with my strengths.”
“Wanda’s okay,” Mitch said. “Just a little…ah…eccentric.”
Tommy thought that was funny. “Eccentric? Holy shit, Mitch, that what you call eccentric? My cousin Lyle collected wooden dressmaker’s dummies and Victorian parasols. He was queer as they come, but a hell of a nice guy. My mother always said he was eccentric. I agree. But Mother Sepperley? Damn, that’s not eccentric, that’s scary.”
“Ah, you liked her and you know it.”
“I did. She was strange, but she was my kind of strange.”
Mitch walked through the deepening puddles. “Trust me, Tommy, she’s spooky, but you haven’t met the real witch in this neighborhood, but you will.”
“Oh Christ.”
The Zirblanski house was next and nobody answered the door.
So on they went to the Blake house, but only after Mitch warned Tommy that he was about to meet the real witch of Kneale Street. Mitch explained that she had a lot of guns and she liked to use them.
“Just keep your head down,” he said.
“I’m not liking this,” Tommy said.
“I’d like to say she’s harmless, but I don’t think she is. Miriam Blake had her way, she’d shoot anyone that wasn’t white, Christian, and carrying a firearm.”
Now that Tommy had been prepared, they went right up on the porch and that was when the first shot rang out. Had Tommy been any closer to that doorbell, he would have lost his hand.
“Holy shit!” Tommy cried as he and Mitch hit the porch on their bellies.
Inside, there was screaming and shouting and the sound of something crashing. Then the door opened and Mitch saw Rhonda Zirblanski standing there. She was a tough little shit, he knew, but there were tears in her eyes.
“She told us to shoot whoever came through the door,” Rhonda said. “She gave us guns. Said anybody that came to the door was here to rape and rob and murder. She gave us guns, but we didn’t shoot, Mr. Barron! I swear, we didn’t shoot!”
Mitch rose slowly and when he did, tough or not, Rhonda fell right in his arms and he took hold of her, afraid for one frightening moment that she had been shot. But that wasn’t it; she was just overwrought.
When they got inside, they saw Rhonda’s twin, Rita, standing there, looking pissed-off, her eyes just black and simmering like burning pitch. “Hey, Mr. Barron,” she said.
Miriam Blake was on the floor in a blue jogging suit, covering her face with both hands. “Evil effing little bitches! See what they did to me? I take them in, little conniving harlots, and this is how they repay me! It’s their upbringing! Their upbringing! Goddamn parents, that’s what! Goddamn liberal sonsofbitches—”
“You better shut up,” Rita told her and from the tone of her voice, Mitch was thinking that was good advice.
When Miriam peeled her hands away from her face, her mouth was bloody and a blue welt was rising under her right eye.
Mitch sighed as Miriam kept complaining and Rhonda was talking about the guns and how Miriam was a crazy old hag and she knew she wasn’t supposed to say that, but crazy was just crazy, wasn’t it? And Mitch was in stark agreement with her. Tommy grabbed the 12-gauge off the floor that Miriam had tried to pepper them with and not too far away were a couple of little .32 autos. Tommy shoved them both in the pockets of his raincoat and stood there with the shotgun, looking confused.
When Rhonda was done talking, Mitch said, “She wanted you to shoot us?”
“That’s a lie!” Miriam snapped. “That’s an effing goddamn lie! You little bitch, you little—”
“Shut the hell up,” Tommy told her.
That did it. Miriam sat there, silenced, but hardly out of fight. She glared at Tommy and from that look, he was pretty glad she no longer had access to that Remington pump because she looked just mad enough to use it. Not that he was surprised after the welcome they’d received.
Rhonda started talking again, upset still but calming down an inch at a time. She started repeating verbatim the mad nonsense Miriam had filled her head with: shit about liberal Jews taking over the country and how they controlled the media and the government. How good old American Christian values were being stomped and stifled so that gays could marry and sluts could have abortions. That Hitler had had the right idea because those effing Jews had killed Christ and didn’t they honestly have the Holocaust coming? Well, didn’t they?
Now, Mitch could have given a high hairy shit what Miriam believed in or didn’t believe in, but you didn’t go shoveling this neo-facist bullshit down the throats of impressionable children. You just didn’t.
And handguns? Jesus, you just didn’t pass them out to kids.
“That’s what she kept saying,” Rita told him. “Then when you came up on the porch, she told us to shoot you. And when we wouldn’t, she shot at you instead.”
On the floor, Miriam loo
ked like a cobra all coiled up and ready to spit its venom. Her eyes were fixed and glassy and she was trembling like something in her was ready to explode. Mitch figured if Tommy and he hadn’t been there, she would have killed Rita and Rhonda. Bloody drool was hanging from her lower lip and she did not seem to care.
She made to open her mouth and Tommy shook his head.
She closed it just as quick.
“What happened then?” Mitch asked.
Rita shrugged. “Then I hit her. I punched her in the face twice.”
She was so honest about it, so completely matter-of-fact, that Mitch almost started laughing. Miriam did not seem to think it was funny, though. Her right eye was nearly closed now, black-and-blue and in need of a cold steak. Mitch had to turn away from her. No, it was not exactly humorous that some eleven-year old toughie had flattened her, but at the same time, it was. If Rita had not acted quickly and decisively, Miriam might have killed Tommy or he. There was a very good chance of that. Mitch knew those girls had balls—the entire neighborhood was very much aware of that—he just never knew how much balls. Until now. He could just about envision it in his mind. Miriam going coo-coo and blasting at the door and Rita stepping over and giving her two shots to the face that dropped the old bitch.
And lookit that shiner, will ya? That kid has some kind of hook on her!
Miriam was rocking back and forth on her haunches. She was into her seventies, just a kid by Wanda Sepperly’s gauge, but still pretty old. But looking at her there, she looked not only spry but dangerous.
“Am I allowed to talk now?” she said in her characteristically shrill, catty tone.
Nobody objected. But Rita’s eyes narrowed and you could see the threat in them, the promise to Miriam that if she started running down her parents again, there was a whole can of ass-whooping still on the shelf, seal never broken, and it had Miriam’s name on it.
Mitch thought she was going to start shouting at the girls again, but she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I know you, Mitch Barron. Oh yes, I’ve got your number, Mister Union Man. Don’t think I don’t.”
“It’s in the book,” Mitch said.
Then she looked right at Tommy. “But you? I don’t know you. Now tell me, hotshot, are you a Republican or a Democrat?”
Tommy looked like he was going to laugh, but he held it in. “Neither. I think they’re all a bunch of freaking parasites. So I think you’ve got my number, too.”
Miriam looked like she was ready to leap. “If my husband were alive—”
“If you’re fucking husband was alive, you old hag, I’d hope he’d have more sense than to be handing out guns to grade school kids,” Tommy said to her.
Mitch figured the both of them were about to launch into some half-ass argument, but that didn’t happen. Because the Kneale Street posse arrived.
11
They were one sorry sight: Margaret Boyne and her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the district school superintendent.
“We heard shots,” Margaret said and then saw Miriam Blake sitting there, beaten and bloody. “Oh my God…what happened?”
Mitch said, “Miriam ran out of clay ducks so she thought she’d use us instead.”
He briefly sketched in what had transpired and Miriam didn’t even try to stop him. She looked right at him as he told his story, a scowl on her face. She made sure everyone could see that scowl and how her eyes rolled upwards in their sockets like it was the biggest load of bullshit Mitch Barron had ever shoveled.
Russel just stood there with that stupid expression on his face, the same one he got when people dared asked him how a healthy man pushing forty could live off his mother and never do a day’s honest work. “There’s been weird shit going on all over town. I been hearing things you wouldn’t believe. This whole thing’s like Y2K…except it’s real this time, it’s really happening.”
Margaret just nodded. She always nodded to what Russel said. Maybe the rest of the neighborhood thought he was a bum, but you’d never convince his mother of that.
Lou Darin, however, did not seem interested. “Well, I for one am not surprised. Anyone with all these guns is bound to crack sooner or later.”
Tommy said, “I have a gun and I got more at home.”
Darin just nodded. “Yes, I’m sure you do.”
Mitch had once most colorfully described Lou Darin as a prick wrapped in an asshole and then dipped in a cunt. That had gotten its share of laughs around the neighborhood because Darin wasn’t exactly real popular. He thought he lived in a gated yuppie community sometimes instead of your very average American working class neighborhood. He had numerous times went before the town council trying to get dogs outlawed in the city limits, clotheslines prohibited, and colorful molded plastic children’s toys of the Little Tike’s ilk banned from yards…these things made the neighborhoods look trashy which brought down property values, you know. He was generally disliked on the school board he lorded over and several parent’s groups had tried unsuccessfully to have him removed from office. Lou Darin was the sort of guy who’d run a red light and then swear at you if you dared beep at him. And when he was asked why he couldn’t seem to balance the school’s budget after four years in office, he was quick to point out that it was the fault of the guy before him. Because it certainly couldn’t be Lou Darin’s fault. Maybe he didn’t go around with a button that said I AM GOD…but then he didn’t have to.
Margaret helped Miriam up onto the sofa and Mitch told the Zirblanksi twins to go over to his house, wait there with Lily. Maybe after Miriam, she won’t seem quite so nutty to you guys. He hated himself for thinking shit like that, but he was worried. About her. About Chrissy. About a lot of things.
Tommy lit a cigarette and Miriam did not object. “Listen to me, all of you. I don’t know where you’ve been today or what you might have seen, but there’s some ugly shit going on in this town. I’ve seen it and I still don’t believe it myself. There’s gonna be shit happening tonight. Bad shit. Now, me and Mitch have been going through the neighborhood here, just warning people. It’s gonna be dark soon and all of you had better just lock your doors and wait it out.”
Which got Russel nodding his head. “He’s right. From what I been hearing, there’s things out in the rain. Things like dead people walking around.”
“Excuse me?” Lou Darin said. “Did I just hear you right? Because certainly I could not have. Dead people walking around? Are you losing your mind? We’ve got a situation out there, surely, but I hardly think we’ve stumbled into a trashy B-movie.”
“Maybe we have,” Mitch said.
Russel said, “It’s more than that, Mr. Darin. A lot more. There were these people came knocking at our door—mom you were still at work—and they started talking, started telling me stuff and it all fits in. This is the end of the world. That’s what it is. It’s all in the Book of Enoch…said so in the pamphlet they gave me. God is sending this flood to wash people off the earth. To punish them for being wicked and stuff. They said that foul abominations will crawl forth from the cellar of hell. That’s what they said and I believe them.”
His mother kept nodding her head. Though, truth be told, to Margaret, the Book of Enoch could have been a collection of dirty jokes for all she knew. But if Russel had said it, well, then it had to be true.
As Lou Darin rolled his eyes, Tommy said, “Excuse me, but who were these people that came to your door?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Oh, no, I’d really like to hear this,” Lou Darin said.
Russel got a little red around the cheeks like somebody had just sandpapered his face. “They were Jehovah’s Witnesses…but I don’t see why that matters.”
“The JoHo’s?” Tommy said. “Christ, I lived next door to one for years. They predict the end of the world every time the Pope farts.”
Russel stared at him. “You know, I don’t recall you being from this neighborhood, smartass. Who the hell are you?”
Tommy smiled. “I’m a
spy sent by the Seventh Day Adventists.”
Even Lou Darin managed a thin smile at that. “Let’s try and be rational here, shall we? These individuals you’re talking about, Russel…well, they’re fringe. You can’t go around believing anyone who wears an END OF THE WORLD placard. People like that are a dime a dozen. So, no, sorry, I think maybe you’re more than a little gullible, but don’t expect me to stand here and listen to that sort of nonsense.” Then he looked over at Russel’s mom. “Margaret? Are you with me on this?”
Oh, Christ, now that was tough. Margaret never disagreed with Russel. She looked from Darin to her son. “Well, I, um…that is…”
But Mitch saved her. “All right,” he said, “I want you to listen to what I have to say. You may not like it, but you’re gonna listen. You’re gonna hear what I have to say.”
They were all looking at him, so he started talking. He told them about the things at Sadler Brother’s and the living severed arm, the burned woman in the culvert pipe and what happened at Lisa Bell’s house. And finished it all off with what came up out of the flooded cellar of Bonnie’s One-Stop over in Elmwood Hills. He left out the part about the dead man exploding when they’d mowed him down in Tommy’s truck. Thing was, about half way through his tale that sounded like something he’d cribbed from a horror comic like The Vault of Horror, he started to run out of steam. It was the subject matter. By the time he’d finished he didn’t even sound like he believed it himself.
Of course, halfway through, Lou Darin began to roll his eyes and then shake his head. He took off his glasses, wiped them clean on a tissue, and then put them back on in time to roll his eyes yet again.
“What do you take me for?” he finally said when nobody laughed. Because he’d spent any number of years in the school system and he’d heard his share of whoppers told by kids and this had to be something along those lines. “No, really, Mitch: what in the hell do you take me for? Do you think I’m a complete idiot that will believe any ridiculous story shoved down my throat? Do I look stupid? What do you think I am?”