A man coughed somewhere upstairs—big, wet hacks like he had a milkshake in his lungs. “Fuh!” he muttered, then coughed again. Must’ve been right at the top of the stairs. Footsteps thumped across the boards over my head.
Beside the hot-water heater my foot kicked something metal that skittered away across the bare concrete. I got down on hand and knees to find it—a pipe wrench with a long narrow handle. I hurried back to my lonely arm, the dangling hams taking turns to whack me across the forehead. I slipped the pipe’s handle behind the bend in the first nail and yanked back hard, but it didn’t fly out, just shifted a little.
“Keenan?” a man upstairs called hoarsely.
“Present,” someone muttered.
I pulled again and again until the nail was rattling as loose as a bad filling, then I plucked it out with my fingers. Then I got to work on the next nail. You needed at least two if you wanted your appendage to heal straight, any carpenter would’ve told you that. Upstairs the men were quiet and I took that as a bad sign.
When the second one clattered to the concrete I knelt and started tapping the nails through the side of my shoulder with the side of the pipe wrench. Just like building a rabbit hutch. The nails were straighter now thanks to the prying-out. I got stupidly queasy each time I broke the skin. “Buck up,” that’s what I’d always said to Ray whenever I was taking a sliver out of his foot and he started squirming. Buck up!
“Not much left of Danny,” they said upstairs.
“Boots and saddles,” the sheriff said. “Any exit from down there, Alice?”
She muttered a response.
“Rip the fucker to shreds,” a guy announced.
Holding my shoulder against its empty socket was a slippery operation, the nails sticking out sideways like antennae. I backed up to the hot-water heater then ran at the post as fast as I could, hoping like hell the shoulder would still be correctly positioned when I connected. I concentrated on the nail heads striking at a perfect right-angle, then I slammed into the post like De Niro breaking a door down. The thud shook clear into the middle of my chest. I stepped back and saw the nails had been driven in better than halfway, then I rammed the post again. Then they were three-quarters of the way. I let the arm dangle there by itself, and it held! I thought hard about clenching my fist, clench, clench, clench, at which point my index finger moved a full millimeter.
As I turned to caress the nearest ham, I saw their black legs on the steps, steps that were so goddamn solid they hadn’t creaked so much as a whisper. It didn’t look like they’d brought flashlights so I had a couple of seconds before the apes’ eyes adjusted. The first stepped down onto the concrete, his pistol thrust out in front of him. They’d given up on truncheons and helmets. Too angry for precautions, which sounded familiar.
I lifted the pipe wrench with the toe of my shoe then caught it in my left hand—the right hand would need another minute. The rafters were too low to swing the wrench overhand so just as the first ape turned to squint at me, pistol wavering, I brained him sidearm across the temple. He dropped. I put the wrench in the back of my pants, scooped up his pistol and slid into the dark under the stairs. I looked up at the second ape through the slats. Why where we bothering with each other? If it hadn’t been for that goo from Pipe #9 we might’ve been sitting together to open a bag of chips.
The second one had stopped but he didn’t even holler, like he’d expected the first one to drop.
“Light-switch down here?” he called up the stairs.
If I didn’t want Josie and Ray’s battered mug-shots in the Hunter-Gatherer for passing bad checks I knew I’d have to lead by example, so even though the second Penzler boy was directly above me and I could have put a bullet up his ass and out the top of his head, I waited for him to take another step down, his foot directly in front of my face, then I shot him through the back of the calf. The muscle burst like a water balloon, and as he tumbled to the bottom of the stairs I jumped over him and the first ape, and I started up toward the bright rectangle of kitchen, my feet nearly slipping in the mess halfway up.
The ape I’d shot must’ve been shrieking but I didn’t hear him because my sinuses filled with a smell of gunpowder and blood, and goddamn if it wasn’t just like cured meat! I charged up the last step into the kitchen—it was mostly charcoal, the curtains and strips of wallpaper black and swaying, and the real reason for the smell was the freezer guy, cooked to the bone against the cupboard door. Through a hole in the wall I could see a half-dozen low buildings out behind the house. If Colleen and the kids weren’t charging through the hole it meant something had happened to them, which was my fault for bringing them down McCauley Road. I put the gun in my belt and hunted under the sink for big garbage bags. No sound from downstairs, so the second ape had either bled to death or fainted. The bags at the top of the stack were melted together but the rest were all right—a flashlight under there too. How soon before more came to get me? If my blood hadn’t turned to Vaseline it would’ve pounded in my ears.
“Nah, I’ll be at hq another half-hour,” Penzler was saying. “Place fucking stinks! We didn’t deserve anything like this, Christ.” The voice came from down a hallway, maybe an intercom panel up at the front door. “Get Jones on the phone.”
“Plenty of reinforcements on the way,” the sheriff’s voice said.
So it was time to load up on hams and hightail it to the ambulance, but then where, if I didn’t know exactly where to find Natalia? My highly intelligent penis twitched at the idea of adding Alice to the crew as navigator but while my brain was still running the show I hurried down the stairs to my basement seclusion. If I still wanted Penzler himself he was back at his flattened headquarters, I’d been there a day too early, but in the meantime there was Alice and her sister and the cure, the cure, the cure!
My flashlight beam showed the two Penzler guys sprawled in a pool of blood eight feet across—and it was trickling out of the back of the second guy’s leg, not spurting, which might’ve meant his heart was slowing down. I set the flashlight on the bottom step, turned the guy over and unbuckled his belt. His holster kept it from sliding out all at once but after I unsnapped that the belt came free so I could loop it around his thigh. I stepped on the leg to pin it down, then tied as tight a knot as I could manage above his knee—only time would tell if it was tight enough to stop the flow, though I wouldn’t be around to see that. But I was confident that my single act of mercy would inspire plenty of clemency when I stood trial for all of the guys I’d killed and/or maimed since Thursday morning.
“Oh,” she said behind me. “You are still here.”
My jellied heart thudded. Alice rolled the flashlight back and forth with her bare foot. Her hair hung loose. I stepped into her and wrapped my arms around the small of her back, which in the long view was nearly as inexplicable as when I stopped chewing the guy’s ear off. We kissed each other on the mouth and I was hard within seconds, which should’ve been impossible since my blood pressure was five over zero. She squeezed the back of my neck and pulled away.
“Yuck,” she said, running her tongue behind her lips, “I guess you haven’t brushed your teeth.”
“They know you’re down here?”
“I told the boys I had to settle the animals in the barn, so we might have five minutes. I said these guys were already out there.”
I put my hands on either side of her neck and kissed her again. She used her tongue and the very ends of her lips in equal measure, like she was dancing around my mouth, sometimes hardly touching it. She was up one step so her breasts pressed into my chest.
“Hey,” she whispered. “Your arm works.”
What kind of people make out like weasels beside two critically injured rent-a-cops? Lonely ones? She bit my earlobe, and the ear stayed on. Of course I thought of Donny Brown’s ear then, which ought to have cooled me down to a more human level, but I put my fingers inside t
he waistband of her pants anyway. She had a warm bum, though my right hand couldn’t tell. She reached down and pulled my wrists up.
“Five minutes,” she whispered, “is how long you’ve got to get out. What’s the bag for?”
“Hams.”
She stepped down into the blood and took a good look at the guys.
“Roll them on their sides,” she said, “or they’ll swallow their tongues.”
I’d done that for Chad, sure, because he was a kid. After that she pulled out a pocket knife and helped me chop down a half-dozen hams, then she used the bottom step like a cutting board and sliced one up—and the peristalsis in a zombie’s esophagus must be a determined process, because I hardly chewed even once. I make it sound like an all-afternoon picnic but really we shuffled around and bumped into each other and got our feet sticky with blood and the whole thing took about ninety seconds.
“Nothing I haven’t seen out in the barns,” she said.
That line-of-dominoes sensation of nitrite-rich vitality flooded back into my limbs. And that feeling didn’t make Alice any less beguiling.
“If you’re going to find Nat you’ve got to get going!”
“Hell,” I said, “you just like me because I won’t be around for long.”
“Natalia can tell you how long you have.” She kissed me, a flicker of tongue against my teeth. “And it’ll be longer than half an hour, because she’s months ahead of you. Maybe a year. If she’s not better by now she just has to come home. Here’s that telegram, and I wrote her mailing address on the back.”
“So why doesn’t your dad bring her back?”
“We disagree about it.”
I glanced at the paper as I folded it in my pocket. A po box in San Luis Obispo.
“But that won’t be where she lives?”
“Inside a po box? You’ll have to be a detective for five minutes to find that out, all right? Then get her home!”
“Are these hippie doctors with beards?”
“The ones I’ve met had beards. Let’s get to the back here.”
The head-wound guy groaned through the roof of his mouth, and the follicles across my head crackled.
“Hold on—you said there’s a cure.” My fist tightened around the bag of ham. “But it hasn’t ever worked?”
“They don’t tell me! Go out and get her, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Why don’t you get her yourself?”
“I get as far as Preston and his staff swoops in, it’s happened eight times! Must have a microchip in the back of my neck. He’s scared I’ll get pregnant or drug-addled, plus he doesn’t want his only non-zombie offspring out of his sight. So instead I look at the internet all day and make sure nobody’s infringed his patents.”
These people proved what I’d said at Dad’s funeral: families are pointless.
“No such thing as zombies,” I muttered.
She really did roll her eyes that time. Then she covered the flashlight with the palm of her hand and we quit breathing as enough footsteps thundered across the ceiling to be a herd of cattle. I’d given up on imagining it was Harv and Colleen.
She took my wrist—I nearly had feeling back in that right arm—and led me behind the hot-water heater, the flashlight trained on our feet, then through a wooden door that she barred behind us by quietly lowering a waiting two-by-four into iron brackets. Who’d have a room like that in their basement? The air smelled like rank washcloths. She kept me moving between two brick walls, and so many boots thudded over us I thought the ceiling might come down. The cobwebs wavered like kites.
“Kirk’s away in town!” the sheriff hollered above us. “The kid’s in the stable!”
I stopped walking.
She shut off the flashlight. “What?”
“You’re a Penzler, and you folks have fucked up everything in my life.” Everything since Lydia.
“But you’re still going to get my sister?” Alice’s voice asked.
I listened to the dark. Boots were thundering down those basement stairs.
“I’ll give you five million dollars,” she said. “How does that sound?”
The last Walgreens flyer I’d seen had advertised bacon at $3.29 a pound for the really good cheap stuff that congeals a half-inch deep across the pan. I could feed Amber and the rest for a decade.
“And I’m qualified because—what?” I whispered. “I broke into your shed?”
“Am I supposed to phone up a soldier of fortune, give him a credit card number?”
I remembered from Lydia that when a woman adopts a certain tone she isn’t expecting a response. Alice flicked the flashlight back on. She found the knob to another door and we passed through into fresher air, with steps against the far wall that climbed to a set of root-cellar doors shaped like shutters. Sunlight filtered through gaps in the wood. She stepped up and put her eye to a crack.
“Stupid armored vehicles circling around,” she whispered. “He leased them all yesterday after the explosion. I told him they’d suck, listen to those carburetors!”
“You sound like you’re pretty tight with your dad.”
“Until he decided my sister was really sick.” She kept an eye outside but I saw a shoulder droop. “Took matters, as usual, into his own hands.”
“You’re serious about that money.”
She jumped down and straightened out some musty blankets that had been balled up on a shelf. She lay down with her head against the water-stained foundation.
“Come stretch out,” she said. “The trucks’ll head cross-country in a minute.”
“Why wouldn’t they think I was still down here?”
“I threw a strip of your pants out the hole in the wall.”
I set my gun and wrench on the step then lay down beside her warm arm. She laced her fingers through mine. I could see in the gloom that she’d shut her eyes, so I shut mine too. I felt tired like I was still tied to that piano—must’ve been the strain of putting my limbs back on.
“How’d your sister get to be a zombie exactly?”
“Long story,” she murmured.
“Why do you live out here if you’re the multinational Penzlers?”
“Oh,” she said softly. “Our mom grew up here.”
I touched the tip of my thumb to the tip of my pinkie. Worked like clockwork.
“Have you ever been on a horse?” she asked.
I had to think hard about that.
“At my grandparents’,” I said.
“Can you do it again?”
“I’ll carry it on my back if I have to.”
“I’ll put you on Shamanski, they’ll think you’re a neighbor. Who ever saw a zombie on horseback, right?”
“Ever heard of one that throws up?”
“Careful your nails don’t catch on anything. Wait here a minute.”
She got up, climbed two steps, unlatched the bolt and pushed the doors up in a burst of shredded cobwebs and white light. Her sweatpants started up into the yard. Christ, no! my baffled penis called after her.
She turned to drop the doors back into place. I peered through a crack as she jogged away across brown grass then through a low door into one of those peeling-paint blue sheds. A goat bleated somewhere. This was the start, we were on our way indisputably to California. Clint had been right.
But why way out west? Even if Penzler kept a lab out there, couldn’t they have sent a vial back to Ohio in a courier envelope instead of flying a dissolving girl all that way? No, it had to be bullshit—Out to California for a cure was probably a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Which reminded me: there was that telegram. Who the hell sent telegrams anymore?
mr k penzler
n’s progress less dramatic than first hoped stop other work wildly successful will incorporate n if you advise stop will telephone immediately w
hen cell tower repaired stop
dr q duffy
A science outfit, and it couldn’t even send e-mail? Fishy as Charlie Tuna. And why was I leaving Preston before I could throttle her old man? Because if he’d had the cure he would not have sent Natalia to California. Though if we were really reanimated corpses like they’d said on the radio, would it just cure us of being alive?
The cellar doors flew open again, blinding me. Alice, back already?
“Seriously,” whispered Colleen, taking the front of my shirt in her hands, “leaving the girl to wait is bullshit! You raised on Enid Blyton?”
“Holy shit,” I said, “you can’t be down here, there’s—”
“We saw her run out and figured this was it! Harv’s bringing the ambulance!”
Blinking like hell, I dragged my plastic bag and climbed up after her, tucking my tools in the back of my belt. Did the gun even have bullets? From the front of the house I heard gears grinding, an engine.
“It’s California from here,” I told Colleen. “I’ve got tons of hams.”
But on the grass a big pink pig looked at us and wagged its tail—a black furry tail with a brown tip like a German shepherd’s, attached with the spike that Christopher Robin used on Eeyore. My fingers, unbidden, went to the nail heads in my shoulder.
“Oh,” said Colleen. “Good dog.”
Then gunshots clapping on our ears—a broken roof shingle hit the ground in front of us. Apes, but where? The pig turned, chasing its tail, and fell down. I pulled Colleen low behind a woodpile, then we ran like hell along the side of the house. Our ambulance roared up the lawn from the front, tearing up turf, sun glancing off the windshield, turning in a tight circle so it’d be ready to make an exit, then twenty feet from us it lurched to a stop and the back doors flew open. And Franny and Megan reached out?
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