“Ignacio! Oh, mi pobre chico dulce!”
The car exhaust thinned, and from it stepped José Frito.
One of his pistols was gone, probably dropped after it was depleted of ammo. Its partner hung from his right hand, a petal of smoke unfurling from the muzzle. His Father of the Year act was kaput: he’d shot both Silvana and Ignacio and looked ready to shoot everyone else. José’s presence suggested he’d prevailed over Sam Hell. His mustache was stiff with blood. He was flecked with abrasions. The fabric he’d knotted over his left forearm had fallen away, revealing a bite wound that matched the exact contours of a child’s jaws.
José moved more groggily than the children. His face had gone the color of eggnog. Individual veins rose like blue worms hoping to burrow free. His swollen eyelids oozed batter over dark, hollowed sockets. He began to lift the gun; it juddered as his muscles spasmed.
Cradling her boy’s head to keep the brains inside, Magdalena reached for José’s gun arm. It was chilling how easily, even under duress, José slapped her across the face. More chilling was the familiarity with which she took the blow. She fell to the left, but by luck not too far; a car swerved around her head so closely its back tire munched a lock of her hair.
José watched the car pass with dreamy interest, then looked at the dead boy, then at the gun in his hand. Greer believed she could read his thoughts faster than his own muddled brain could process them. There were people everywhere who’d seen what he’d done, they’d rat on him unless he finished them off. He squinted at Drasko and Greer through gluey eyes, and with an unpredictable jolt, raised the gun and fired.
Drasko Zorić was shot in the right breast. Somehow he didn’t hit the asphalt, rather catching himself in a spider’s stance. He moved like a spider, too, tumbling on all fours toward Greer’s trailer. The oldest child, fourteen-year-old Antonella, walked past José, Magdalena, and Greer, perhaps attracted by Drasko’s flailing, and dropped to her knees near where the Serbian had collapsed. His blood trailed across the asphalt; Antonella lowered her face to the stream and began to lap it up, scuttling closer to his body.
José registered none of this. He took a tottering step over Magdalena, gaze fixed on Greer, and grinned. His teeth were pink with blood. More, thicker and blacker, squeezed between them, With the blood came a grunt Greer instantly recognized.
“C’mere.”
A mud-encrusted family van appeared like a ship through foggy seas. A massive metal grille threw a bucket’s worth of rain into Greer’s face a second before it clobbered José with the sound of wet meat. He sailed through the air, his back snapped so completely, the back of his head touched his heels. Greer threw herself off the road, hearing all four tires crunch across dead Ignacio and alive Magdalena. The van veered too late, shearing through the playground with a splattery rasp.
Turning her back, Greer ran. She was at her trailer in seconds, slamming into it with her right shoulder, the one Sam Hell had kicked.
The pain was electric. She saw black fireworks. When her vision returned, she was startled to find her hands bloody. What had happened? She widened her gaze to see she’d smacked into the red smear that ran along the side of the trailer. It had been one of the first things she’d noticed when she’d stepped outside. If only she’d followed the streak to the trailer’s end and continued up the road to the park exit. She would have seen nothing of what she’d recently witnessed. Now Greer managed one step in that direction before a large figure shuffled around the corner, blocking her path.
Dry, brown blood crusted his hand: he must have been the one who’d slapped the bloody print on the trailer-door window and left the smear on the wall. He wolfishly sniffed Greer’s scent and ponderously lifted his head from its droop. His brown eyes had dimmed behind an opaline scrim. His jaws were askew, draining saliva onto his HortiPlastics uniform. His glasses were gone except for a broken earpiece still lodged behind an ear.
“Daddy,” Greer said, and Daddy, as he always had, came for her.
No Longer in Service
The easiest choice in life is to give in. To teachers’ low expectations. To bodily sensations generated with boys like Qasim. To friends’ pressure to drink this or swallow that. Greer had been calling for Daddy since she’d stepped into the morning mist, and now that he’d come to collect her, there was nothing she wanted more than to bury her face into his broad chest.
His arm extended as gently as if he were after a butterfly. His middle finger brushed her hoodie. One fingertip, calloused from thousands of pulls of a hunting bow, snagged a hood string. This minuscule, even delicate, tussle of finger versus string, so unlike Freddy Morgan’s usual blunt actions, spurred Greer to lean out of reach. She didn’t run; she was not afraid of him as much as afraid for him. Others whose eyes had gone white like his were being beaten, shot, driven over.
What she should do, she thought, was coax Daddy inside their home. Get him out of that bloody HortiPlastics shirt. Clean and bandage his hand. Blot his forehead with a cold cloth, as he’d done so many times for her. Make him the chicken-flavored soup he liked from the yellow powder. He’d made her swear to call an ambulance only in cataclysmic circumstances, as the cost of a single ride could ruin the Morgans more easily than most injuries.
“Let’s get out of the rain, Daddy,” she said. “Can you make it up the—”
Drasko Zorić had a guttural voice, but the last sound he made was a piercing turkey gobble. Spinning in response, Greer glimpsed, behind lancets of rain, his blue tracksuit being torn in competing directions by Antonella and Máximo. Their backs were sickled over him like wild dogs.
Greer felt her father’s hand take hers. From entering first-day grade-school classrooms to exiting vice principal scoldings, this hand had led her everywhere, and she’d never mistake how those big fingers enveloped hers, the heartening pinch of his wedding ring, the comforting rasp of his callouses. This was no different, she told herself.
Except it was—Drasko Zorić’s dying screams insisted on it.
She yanked away. Freddy Morgan’s forehead crinkled. Greer couldn’t afford to wait, lest some other incidental gesture snare her heart. She vaulted the trailer steps and tucked herself inside, slamming the door and locking both bolt and chain. She backpedaled, her bare soles sensitive to every crumb in the carpet, until the backs of her knees struck the chair that held the TV.
She lost her shit the second her butt touched linoleum. With the morning’s hallucinatory horrors now bracketed by her home’s nonchalance, the adrenaline squalling through her body felt like spiders all over her, She tore at her wet clothes, peeling them off like putrid skin until she was naked. Still she felt revoltingly warm, as if dripping hot blood.
Nausea hitched up her throat. She clambered on all fours to the bathroom, where she gripped the toilet bowl with both hands and vomited so hard she could see roses of blood in the water. She rolled onto her back, welcoming the frigid tile. Think of anything else, she ordered herself, Think of Qasim.
Eventually the wind razoring through the unfinished plywood wall chilled her. A good sign. She crawled into her bedroom, Scrounging like a strawberry picker, she gathered underwear, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, jeans, socks, and sneakers. Still on the floor, she pulled and laced, zipped and snapped. She hugged her knees against the end of her bed, freezing now that she was fully clothed.
Outside: shouts, breaking glass, car horns …
… and a light slapping on the door.
From her bedroom, Greer could see the length of the cramped trailer through the open door of her dad’s bedroom. It was like peering through a forest understory. The trash can so overstuffed the lid floated loose atop the slag, a leaking bag of kitty litter for a cat that had croaked a year ago, the tangle of blankets on the sofa bed Conan slept on. The whole family had been trapped there for four years.
Before, they had lived in Bulk proper, three blocks from the middle school she and Conan attended. After Vienna Morgan was incarcerated and the robbed families we
re compensated, Freddy lost his boiler-repair job and the Morgan house had been foreclosed upon, They’d ended up in Sunnybrook. The first time they’d entered the forty-foot trailer, Freddy had hit his head on the ceiling fan, drawing blood. After closing the deal, he’d gone outside, set up his bow-hunting target, and taken shots for hours, as if every bull’s-eye slew one of his past mistakes.
The whole place was rotten. A third of the ceiling had turned to oatmeal from water leakage; visible through those gaps were roof trusses warped like tusks and metal plating pitted with cavities. When it rained, like this morning, strings of rust water as thick as the bloody drool from her father’s mouth (Don’t think of it) landed in buckets permanently placed below, while musty snarls of carpet indicated where new buckets were needed. The two longest walls leaned inward, like they might snap shut like Ignacio’s jaws aiming at his mother’s foot (Don’t think of it), swallowing the Morgans alive.
Both drywall and window frames were buckled. Freddy Morgan’s attempts to fit plastic into the windows failed when the replacement panels came loose in the sash, like Mama Shaw’s dentures popping from her slavering mouth (Stop, stop, stop). In surrender, Freddy nailed large patches of galvanized chicken wire on the inside of the trailer’s six windows. To Greer, it made the place feel like one of Vienna Morgan’s jail cells, but Freddy was proud of the result and Conan didn’t care.
Greer had hated the chicken wire until this second. The tapping on the door’s window became a pounding, which gave way to the pop of cleaving glass. It was Freddy Morgan, butting up against his own defenses. He struck the chicken wire again and again. Each time, the barrier droned an open chord, and Greer found herself humming along. It was the song that would save her life, if only it kept playing.
An open-palmed thud came from a second window.
Broken glass chimed from a third.
Greer hummed louder to block the noise. The chicken wire would hold.
At first, she thought the burbling bass note was the sound of a fourth besieger, until she recognized it as Daddy’s eight o’clock alarm, his reminder to take a baby aspirin for pulmonary health. It was a phone alarm. Daddy’s phone was inside the trailer. And Greer knew his passcode. She’d find it, call the cops. They’d take their sweet time getting there, and like Mama Shaw’s orderlies—Maybe They’re smarter than They seem—they’d think the residents were getting what they deserved. But she’d swallow their scorn one more time.
Above the sofa, the chicken wire nailed over the broken window bulged from bashing hands, She tiptoed past, grimacing, and the beating stopped. The face behind the wire stared at her. It was Sam Hell. His skin was purplish gray, his eyes pearl white. Blood splattered his neck and chest. He watched Greer with the witless stare she’d seen on boys looking at porn, then snuffled like a pig, shoved his fingers through the wire, and yanked harder than before.
Sam Hell’s agitation elicited a whine from the far end of the trailer. Thirty feet away and through metal mesh, Greer still recognized Máximo, His mouth was painted red, and scraps of skin jiggled between his teeth. Each slam of his hands against the chicken wire cut bloody hexagons into his chubby palms.
Spotting the phone on the kitchen counter, Greer grabbed it. But she couldn’t call the cops on Daddy without looking at him one more time, hoping that his eyes and mind had cleared. His face remained visible at the door’s window. He had quit moving, did not blink or twitch or breathe. Greer prayed for this to be a positive development. She took a single step closer. His eyes, beneath white mucus, moved as she approached, but he wasn’t staring at her. He was staring at his phone.
Freddy Morgan, who had yet to recognize his own daughter, seemed to recognize his phone’s alarm. That upset Greer in a primal way, as if she had been erased. At the same time, she understood. Anytime she heard a digital bleep similar to her wake-up alarm or incoming texts, she acted the same way, just like she’d been trained.
“I’m going to call an ambulance, Daddy,” she whispered. “The police too.”
Daddy did not react.
“I know you told me to only do that if I was sure, But I’m sure, Daddy. I’m really sure. Do you hear that? Can you see Them? They’re trying to get in. They’re going to hurt me, Daddy, just like They hurt you. If you know how to stop Them, do it, okay? Can you tell Them to stop?”
Nothing about her father altered except for some reddish spit that spilled down his chin. He still seemed focused on the phone and its mambo beat. Maybe the alarm was preventing a more meaningful exchange. Greer thumbed the phone to life and swiped, killing the tone, then looked at Daddy for any changes in expression.
There were many, all awful. Only when squinting down the barrel of his hunting rifle had one of his eyebrows peaked so sharply, and now both did, daggering like dragon wings, while his hairline drew downward. His nostrils flared so widely Greer thought they might tear. His mouth was the worst of all, The lower jaw had practically detached, as if straining to swallow the whole door, the whole trailer, the whole world.
Greer recognized the sound that echoed up from his throat, It was want. Freddy Morgan’s want, however, had changed. No longer was he focused on a better job, a nicer home, a happier life—the trifling baubles dangled before a hypnotized populace. No, this want had lain in wait for three million years, hiding beneath the smiles, the nods, the haircuts, the uniforms, the time cards, the deference, the fear.
Daddy punched his hands, fingertips first, at the chicken wire. The wire carved finger-flesh in half-moons that fell like fingernail clippings. He made a frustrated bellow. Withdrawing his mangled fingers, he catapulted his face into the chicken wire. His nose, lips, and cheeks flattened. A tidy, geometric grid of blood sprang from his entire face. His tongue snaked from his mouth, encountered wire, and pushed against it. Wire began to slice the tongue down the center.
Instinctively, Greer shouted, “No!” but Freddy Morgan had never been one to quit what he’d started. His neck thickened as he drove his face more forcefully into the mesh. Ruby blood oozed from every crosshatch. Still he pushed, until the chicken wire wrapped around his face, digging all the way to his skull. Like that, his face was jellied into two dozen individual hexagons of flesh. One piece, comprised of his right upper lip, plopped like dough from a cookie cutter, revealing long yellow teeth and a patch of gray mandible, Other hexagons jiggled, ready to drop. Both halves of Daddy’s tongue, fully forked now, wiggled separately.
Greer ran for her bedroom. When she saw a new set of paws battering the window over her bed, she instead banked into the bathroom, the only windowless space. The toilet water swayed, and Greer flashed to the time she’d opened it to find a rat paddling inside, the porcelain scritch of its claws the sound of nightmares to come. That single drenched rat now seemed like a warning: the trailer, the park, the whole society was full of holes, and through them, the biters would come.
Lifting Daddy’s phone, Greer, at long last, dialed 911. It rang twice, brittle digital trills. At the moist click of an answered call, Greer blurted first.
“Greer Morgan, I’m Greer Morgan, I live in Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort in Bulk, Missouri, and I’m trapped in my home, there are people everywhere, They’ve gone crazy, They’re attacking each other, there’s people dead and hurt, we need police and ambulances, you need to hurry, it’s Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort in Bulk, Missouri, I’m Greer Morgan, They’ve broken all my windows, They’re going to get inside, hurry, please, please hurry.”
She gasped for breath. Only then did she hear the recording.
“The local time is 8:04 a.m. To place a call, press one. If you need additional assistance, press zero for the operator or remain on the line. If this call is an emergency, hang up and call 911. To hear your options again, press star.”
“What the fuck,” she said.
She killed the call, redialed 911. From her bedroom, the tinkle of breaking glass. She ducked, and when the shatter faded, heard the robo-woman offering the same bleak options.
“I did dial fucking 911!” Greer had never used an operator in her life, but times like this must be why such backup systems existed, She did as instructed and pressed zero; the Morgans had always followed the rules. The line clicked twice, and the signal switched to a staticky purr. A different robo-woman answered:
“We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.”
“The number was zero! You fucking told me to press zero!”
They hung up on her.
A motorcycle chainsawed past the trailer, reminding Greer that people who might help were still in the vicinity. She started screaming, the old-fashioned 911, and was shocked, and strangely thrilled, by her stabbing pitch and volume. Since being cool had become a thing—around middle school and the move to the Last Resort, she’d kept her voice apathetic. There was something breathtaking about her soaring, feminine shriek.
But all her screams did was attract more of the rabid, More hands slapped the siding. Someone was tearing off a shutter. It sounded like someone had crawled under the bathroom and was clobbering the waste tank. Most worrisome were the heavy cracks of something blunt striking the trailer’s far corner, likely Drasko Zorić’s baseball bat. The good news was the trailer corner was a senseless target. The bad news was that, until then, none of the rabid had shown the wherewithal to operate tools.
Maybe They’re smarter than They seem.
She was getting the fuck out of this trailer. It was all she’d ever wanted to do.
There was nothing useful in the bathroom. She made for the wobbling hallway. The second she hit the main room, Sam Hell’s arm punched through the window over the sofa. The chicken wire popped free, and Greer felt pulled nails, cold as ice chips, patter her side. She jagged right, dodging Sam Hell’s hand by inches, You are reaching for a Greer Morgan, said a voice in her head, who has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
The Living Dead Page 11